Doctacosa

Trying to follow (or lead!) online trends can be a challenge, as I've written about before. One of the big aspects of this is choosing a platform (or many) and making the best use of it all. To better get an idea on my options were, I decided to look closer into Mastodon and other Fediverse services.

Now, many of you might be thinking “what the heck is a Mastodon?” Yes, it's an animal, it's also a band, but I'm not writing about either of these. Mastodon is a federated, decentralized microblogging service. Beyond the jargon, it means that you can write short-ish messages, publish them online and let others comment and react. Since it's decentralized, anyone can run their own servers and people are free to join the ones they like. There is no single entity like Twitter Inc. that owns the platform. Still, the multiple servers all talk to each other, so you don't need to join the same place as others.

After looking around, I've setup a Misskey instance for a trial run. It can communicate with other services like Mastodon smoothly, so you only need to join anywhere to get in touch with people. Easy! I'll be using this to test further and see what integrations I can do.

The goal here is to have a place that anyone can join and chat on, plus I gain a convenient spot to automatically post news on. Bonus, since this is linked to other online services, people can follow updates from whenever they like!

Note that this setup is temporary. If I move forward with this, it will be on a new install at a different address, so nothing will be kept.

If you want to give it a look:

• My profile
• The front page, to register

To follow someone, you search for them. If we're both on the same server, you can just search for @doctacosa and follow. If you're already somewhere else, you can find my test account by searching for @doctacosa@misskey.interordi.com . Alternatively, I have an account already established at @doctacosa@social.vivaldi.net . Careful, the first @ is important too!

If you have any interest into this, check it out and let me know what you think!

#social_media #fediverse

– Doctacosa