My Fediverse December 2024

As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon. One of the things I shared, and also partook in, was a research survey, and I think it is still open for you to answer it too if you like.

Plugin development

The issue described last month was resolved and was shipped in version 4.5.0. Pretty cool to see an idea bloom into a reality. It also felt like that, even though I didn’t build it myself, my most tangible contribution to the development of the Fediverse this year.

Loops.video

I created an account on loops.video, which will be some sort of short video platform for the Fediverse. It’s not fully connected to ActivityPub yet, but they got a grant to do it, so I expect it will happen. Find me at https://loops.video/@ainali

Leaving Twitter

I left X with OpenByDefault, the last of my own accounts that I had there. I am still researching how to self-host a server to get me an account on the Fediverse. So far, I am leaning towards a Linux server (VPS) at time4vps as they offer it with Cloudron which would make it fairly easy to get a server up and running. The possibility to host other open source software is also tempting. If you have any experience of them, Cloudron, or other similar setups that you could recommend, I would love to hear from you.

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

My Fediverse November 2024

As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, in particular I enjoyed this analogy to Fediverse being vegetarian, organic, locally produced food and other social media being ultra-processed food by giant corporations. I also enjoyed this personal and educational explainer of the Fediverse:

This month I also encountered a lot of comparisons to Bluesky. While planned to be decentralized and federated, I read enough now to know that it isn’t yet.

Deactivating Twitter

I guess the biggest news is that I finally deactivated my personal Twitter account, @Jan Ainali. Taking the plunge was easier when I figured out how to share my archive, and you can find it on aina.li/twitter. Similarly, I published the much smaller archive for @openbydefault on openbydefault.se/twitter. What is left for me in this regard is to deactivate that account and figure out where and how to start a new Fediverse account, preferably using my own domain.

Streaming and podcast improvements

I continued to do some live streaming on Everything video. Unfortunately, there seems to be something causing to video and audio to lose sync after a few minutes. I think I need to file a bug report somewhere.

On the more fun note, I got into a conversation with the developer of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on Mastodon and got some tips to make the audio file from our podcasts playable directly in the feeds. That’s a really nice step forward.

Post by @pfefferle@mastodon.social
View on Mastodon

The conversation also encouraged me to do a feature request on the plugin, my very first!

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

My Fediverse October 2024

As previous month, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, it felt like that there was more good news this month. I highly enjoyed the FLOSS Weekly podcast episode with Andy Piper about Mastodon and I answered a survey for a bachelor’s thesis about users’ perception of Mastodon.

Creating PeerTube accounts

I finally found an instance that felt serious and allowed live streaming, and now I have a PeerTube account at Everything Video. The channels I have started and plan to publish videos on there is Wiki Editing for myself and one for Wikipediapodden.

I also found the niche instance Urbanists.video so now I have also started an account dedicated for biking in Amsterdam (but not published any videos yet).

Deactivating Twitter accounts

This month I got around to closing down some Twitter accounts I have been managing. Some I tried to archive properly using the instructions from the Internet Archive, but it looks from the logs that X makes it nearly impossible, as all new tweets failed to be retrieved. Some I just did a quick archive of the profile page before deactivating, some even failed archiving the profile page as Twitter makes a (hostile) redirect to another tweet instead. Here are the ones that I have already deactivated:

For Open By Default, @openbydefault I haven’t deactivated yet. I am both in need of starting a Mastodon account somewhere, and get around to publish the old tweets: Internet Archive, archive downloaded

For the Govdirectory project, we wanted to make sure no one else could claim the name, so we pinned a tweet pointing to our Mastodon account.

For Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, we opted to deactivate the account @wikisusdev: Internet Archive.

For Wikipediapodden, we opted to deactivate the account @wikipediapodden: Internet Archive.

Upcoming

In November month, I will publish some of the archives using this conversion tool.

Tips on Mastodon instances that would fit for the deactivated bots (now that Botsinspace is closing) would be appreciated.

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

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.