Keeping track of all that can be taxing. I dedicate my waking hour (ok, maybe an hour before that) to making sense and spinning the plates to keep them going. But the truth is, I’ve started to get bored with the social media spaces, and I took the opportunity Twitter offered as it goes private (or not) to look at the Fediverse:

The fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. 

On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard.[1] 

As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.[2] In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users’ data (such as a calendar or an address book). Source: Wikipedia

 

There’s so much amazing content out there on the Fediverse, it’s easy to get lost. Someone described getting an account in the Fediverse as switching between email providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail). The Fediverse is like email, and you have your choice of how to use it.

Those choices are known as “instances” of Mastodon, the environment that powers each instance. Surprisingly, even Trump’s Truth Social is a derivative of Mastodon, albeit without Fediverse connections.

What’s neat, is that the Fediverse offers more than a Twitter replacement. You can find alternatives for blogging (Write.as), as well as image sharing (PixelFed.social).

 

There have been so many resources shared introducing the Fediverse, and how to get started. Here are some tips I have found useful, and I may add to them from time to time. This is me making sense of my experience, so if you have your own, feel free to drop them in the Comments or link to them from there.

Look for a Mastodon instance that suits your interests. Really, they are as rich and varied as people. I found the list that Clint shares here a powerful space to start. I had started with one instance a few years ago (darn it, lost my password and MFA credentials), but then moved to nobigtech.es (Spanish which was great), then transitioned to mstdn.social and mastodon.social.

Some purists may not appreciate this tip, but why dump Twitter right away? Instead, leverage both social spaces to build your professional learning network (PLN) so that you can maximize connections. I’ve run across two tools that allow you to simultaneously post. You post in Twitter (even via IFTTT) and it appears in Mastodon, or post in Mastodon then watch it appear in Twitter.

Here are the two I stumbled across without hardly looking, shared by brilliant folks on Mastodon. I recommend posting to Mastodon first, then letting it spread from there.

• Cross-poster (What I use) – https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/
• MOA – https://moa.party/
• Birdsite – https://beta.birdsite.live/  
• Scheduler – https://www.scheduler.mastodon.tools/ (schedule your toots)

3- Use Mastodon’s RSS feed to share. 

I love this tip that suggests that you can turn your Mastodon posts into an RSS feed, then drop it into IFTTT type service. This allows you to post your Mastodon account posts to anything else (like LinkedIn, blogs, websites, etc.). This is what mine looks like: https://mstdn.social/@mguhlin.rss

• Every Mastodon account has RSS built in. Just add .rss to the end of the URL for your account, e.g. merveilles.town/@lrhodes.rss
• That lets people follow your public posts from an RSS reader, but it’s also useful if you wanted to use IFTTT to crosspost your public posts to another platform. Source: merveilles.town/@lrhodes.rss

4- Pick your app. 

A lot of the fun of sharing from your mobile device comes from using the right app. Here are a few I tried:

• Mastodon webapp – This is simply a webapp based on the browser version. It works, but meh.
• Mastodon official app – This works, too, is simple, and it’s OK.
• Metatext – This is my favorite free, easy to share with app on iOS devices. That said, I ended up investing in another app (below) because I wanted a different experience. That said, Metatext would be just fine, and a part of me says, “I’ll prob use it to share, the other to read.” I did get some weird error on it when looking at content, so I suspect this simply pulls the web browser version in to display.
• Toot ($3.99) – I’m not sure why I thought this would be a great investment, but it wasn’t a bad one. The app is well-established, and works flawlessly, except it doesn’t include titles of items I share, only the link. You can get around this by copying-n-pasting selected text for quotes (yes, yes, I know folks don’t like quote toots. tough, I do.) in front of the link. Not a big inconvenience, but an extra step I don’t worry about with Metatext.

5- Follow interesting people, er, identities.

It’s so easy to fall into the habit of following anyone who’s saying something, but services like FediFollows make it easy to find people by topic. (Here’s one in Spanish that does the same thing, SigueFedi). One thing that confused me was how to follow people and accounts in different instances. My trouble began when seeing a screen like this one and not knowing what to type. I’ve since figured it out, but I share a screenshot below in case you are curious:

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure