My Fediverse August and September 2024

September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.

Just as lately, these two months were largely similar to the last ones. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.

The larger thing I did do was to talk about and to recommend the Mastodon instance wikis.world for Wikipedians on the Wikipediapodden podcast.

This is the first half of my eighth report of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse July 2024

This month has been largely similar to the last one. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.

The new development I have made is that I have started researching where I could buy a service to self-host a Mastodon server for my company Open By Default. Any tips of lived experience are appreciated.

This is the first half of my seventh monthly report of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse May 2024

This month has been my least active so far this year. Even so, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. But besides that, I have not much to report.

What I am currently hesitating on, is setting up a PeerTube place to stream to. I am still not sure if I should host one myself, or just join an existing instance. A bit more research is needed.

This is the second half of my fifth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse April 2024

As previous months, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. This month, I am particularly excited about the ongoing work of combining OpenBadges with ActivityPub. I saw it on this Mastodon-post, which mentioned ActivityBadges. Fingers crossed something useful comes out of this.

Also, like last month, I continued to update online profiles when I found some still referring to Twitter. I did a sweeping update on all Stack Overflow sites.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I mentioned last month about two motions I submitted for the Annual General Assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. Unfortunately, they were both rejected. However, some of the discussion was about it not being appropriate for the assembly to make this small-scale decision. Perhaps it can still be a strong enough signal to the staff to take action. Time will tell.

This is the first half of my fourth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse March 2024

This month too, I continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. It is encouraging to see that there is a lot going on in this field and that it does not seem to slow down.

For myself, I have gone through my online profiles and where I previously linked to my profile on X, i have now changed them to link to Mastodon. I could make this change on GitHub, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I also wrote two motions for the annual gathering of Wikimedia Sverige, one to leave X, and one to join the Fediverse. We’ll see at the end of April if the other members agree.

This is the first half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse February 2024

This is the first half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month was slower than January, but I did continue with similar positive reinforcements, namely boosting information about Fediverse. That activity was mainly on Mastodon, but I am aiming to widen that scope in the future.

I had planned to watch Fediverse related sessions on FOSDEM and State of Open Con, but could to my surprise not find anything else than very technical talks about integration on specific platforms. If you watched something good, please let me know!

Migrating Let’s talk about public code

In bigger news, I was influential in one substantial task, moving the podcast Let’s talk about public code to a Funkwhale instance: open.audio. The move itself was manual, but fairly easy due to the low number of episodes. Mostly, it was simple copy-and-paste work, and nothing really tricky at all.

One deciding factor for choosing this instance was that rather than open registration, all accounts are manually screened and all content need to have a Creative Commons license. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the platform full of only properly licensed and sharable material.

My Fediverse January 2024

This is the second half of my first monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

In contrast to the other resolution, this has seen less progress, and it is still brewing a lot in my mind. What has come to change in my behavior on Mastodon, though, is that I this month has been actively boosting toots related to different Fediverse news, tools and platforms.

Learning

I watched this excellent conversation with Evan Prodromou and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue:

I was also experimenting with getting the MP3 into the toot on Wikipediapodden, a WordPress site with the ActivityPub plugin enabled, but to no success yet. It would be nice if it could be playable from inside Mastodon, just like an attached MP3 is.

Contributions

I started translating PeerTube to Swedish. Not in bulk, but at least I found where to do it and got my account going.

Planning for the year

I started a larger document with ideas of things to do during this year. Many small ideas that I need to think more about.

In particular, though, I am planning to transfer some of the Wikipedia bot accounts I set up on Twitter to Mastodon, but haven’t found frameworks that are simple enough yet. Any tips, especially guides rather than empty git repositories, for how to run that would be appreciated.

Resolutions for 2024

A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.

Themes

Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.

Documentation

I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).

Running

While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.

EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.

Building a Govdirectory

Which Swedish municipalities have YouTube accounts?

Sometime in 2016 I got the idea of building a website that would display all the social media channels for all Swedish public agencies. The idea popped in my mind as I was learning the flexibility and power of Wikidata. But my confidence in the more advanced tooling to edit it was low, so I put this in the backlog to revisit later since it felt like a huge task.

Unlocking the idea

Five years, almost 50 live streams of editing Wikidata, a won contest, and about 70 Wikidata meetups later, when the announcement of the Unlock accelerator by Wikimedia Deutschland flew into my Twitter feed, not only did I feel more confident, I also had a potential collaborator. So I pitched the idea to Albin Larsson, my co-host of the live streams, but this time on a global scale, not only for Sweden. The idea at this stage was bold and simple:

a global directory of all government agencies and their online presences

We now also knew that by using Wikidata, we could show even more information than only social media. The accelerator program is unusual in that it doesn’t aim to create a startup and make a profit, instead it aims to enable a social impact on the world. The theme this year, (Re)building trust in the digital age, felt really fitting. We worked on an application and short thereafter we were accepted and in a sprint. The first sprint was really great, with the help of our coach Fabian Gampp we took our somewhat technical idea into a purpose driven project by forming a vision and a mission that extended way beyond the technology. Even though we had some ideas of what this could be used for when writing the application, it was still somewhat fleeting in our minds. Our ambitions became these:

Vision

Our vision is a world where people are empowered to engage with their government to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

Mission

We will enable a community powered directory where the online presence of every public organization is easily findable, queryable and trustworthy.

Early days

We are still in the midst of the accelerator program, and just published the midterm report. If you want to give us feedback on our early version at govdirectory.org it would be valuable to us. If you would like to help us even further, check our contributing file on GitHub for improvements on the website and our project page on Wikidata for improving the data displayed in it.