ElectroVagrant

all too easy to forget when among people,
they don't make the world.
some at times think they do, some may be at the center of it to you,
but there is a world beyond us,
and it will go on without us.
unless we remember it,
and harmonize.

formed as could
formed through chances
a universe and what it holds alike
and so it may be shaken as it shakes those within.
So make it.

Article by Mike Masnick

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

inspired by comments in this thread

Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren't being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.

That's where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.

As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.

So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:

"Microblogging" but with relaxed character limits:

1. GoToSocial
2. Hollo
3. Ktistec
4. Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
5. Takahe - More experimental compared to others above

Other

1. GoBlog - Simple blogging
2. Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
3. Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.

I'm sure there's way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you're into that I may have overlooked!

What did you get up to, and what are you getting into here in the End of the Week?

I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.

I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.

Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.

What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?

As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.

However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.

All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.

It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.

Hope this helps!

when tech involved, it's easy to forget the tech hoops one goes through for their systems.

the social media hurdles:

1. knowing about email
   1.1. having made an email
2. knowing about social media
   2.1 finding the social media site or app
3. signing up to social media (proving non-machine at times)
4. verifying registration in email
5. sometimes selecting categories to pick relevant sources to add/follow/subscribe
   5.1 sometimes letting it read your contacts so it can help you find those sources and not having that phase you at all
6. finally getting to a feed/timeline of desired info, sometimes littered with irrelevance, often with ads
   6.1 maybe set up profile avatar/banner/bio if really aiming to be social
7. fussing with the foolish systems to surface what was chosen (or at least similar to it)
8. enjoy when the systems surface what you've chosen (or similar to it)
9. rue the days the systems insist on shoveling you garbage instead

the rss hurdles:

1. knowing what rss is
   1.1 knowing about rss readers
2. finding reader apps still maintained
3. finding sites that still provide supported rss feeds
   3.1 finding where they hide their rss feeds because some like to hide them like they're ashamed of them
4. copy feed link to reader app
5. get only chosen feeds in reader app
   5.1 curse the badly made feeds that include advert articles
   5.2 create filter rules to toss the trash from badly made feeds
6. enjoy chosen feeds with filters in reader app
7. rue the days sites kill their RSS feeds

Any of you that celebrate Halloween already up to anything? Movie marathons/rewatches, books/short story reading/rereading, playing/replaying games, or whatever else?

Also, for those wanting to share spooky vibes, you might check out the following communities:
[email protected]
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