Tag: fediverse

Now Sharing to the Fediverse, My Threads Account

Posted on by Scott

When I checked in on my Threads account recently, I saw that the Fediverse sharing feature was available and turned it on.

As you can see above, I’ve added my Threads account in the last available metadata entry on my primary Fediverse account. In testing the new link before publishing this post, I found that Ivory desktop and mobile clients appear to rewrite the link to @genxjamerican (which doesn’t work). Clicking the Open in Browser button that comes up after the first failed site visit gives you another rewritten URL, https://www.threads.net/user/genxjamerican#. (which also doesn’t work). When I visit my profile in a browser however (at https://hachyderm.io/@genxjamerican), clicking the Threads link takes me directly to the profile as expected.

A search for my handle in the Ivory desktop client now shows my Threads account and my Mastodon account. Only time will tell whether or not the anti-Meta fedi pact I posted about last year has a meaningful impact on the growth of Threads in the fediverse. Meta could just as easily sabotage its own growth through strategic errors. One of the fediverse’s most consistent advocates and contributors, Dr. Jorge Caballero, makes a persuasive argument that paying for “good” Threads posts is one such mistake.

I haven’t really set up anything to cross-post the same content to multiple social media accounts beyond what Jetpack Social supports. My blog posts are automatically posted to Tumblr and to my Mastodon account. I might change that just to see how different the levels of engagement are. IFTTT is probably where I should look first, having set up a bunch of automations there in the past. So far, when it comes to sharing posts from this blog, followers on Mastodon engage far more often with them than in any other social media network where I have a presence.

Flipboard Renewing Its Relevance With the Fediverse

Posted on by Scott

Flipboard is jumping into the fediverse with both feet, according to a piece from The Verge. While the fediverse isn’t where I saw the piece first (that would be on Threads), when Flipboard first announced it was experimenting with Mastodon some months back, it was the first time I’d thought about Flipboard in years (much less used it). Since The Verge piece first ran December 18th, it’s been updated with links to both their Flipboard account, and their Mastodon account.

If you’re not familiar with Flipboard, their key organizing principle is the magazine. Articles you read from any number of sources can be “flipped” into a magazine you create, along with any commentary you may want to provide. As in other social media networks, you can follow other members and be followed by them. You can comment on shared articles and other Flipboard members can respond. Another interesting feature (which I never took advantage of myself) is Invite contributors. I presume this feature allows multiple Flipboard members to contribute articles to the same magazine. This might be how The Verge handles its own presence on Flipboard.

Unrelated to the whole fediverse pivot, reviewing the features of Flipboard makes me wonder if they ever actively pursued the sorts of people who write newsletters. From what I’ve seen of Substack, I haven’t seen anything it does as a service that Flipboard doesn’t do as well or better–and they probably have a much larger number of monthly active users.

The key difference I’ve found so far between the mobile app experience and the web experience of Flipboard is that you can only flip articles into Mastodon via the mobile app.

Another thing Flipboard has changed since I last looked at what they were doing with Mastodon is allow you to add any Mastodon profile URL to your Flipboard profile and display a verified link on your profile page. I’ve already set that up and now my profile looks like this:

This is the sort of attention and interest that Tumblr could have generated had they moved more aggressively in exploring integration with the fediverse via ActivityPub. Tumblr is a first-class citizen on IFTTT, an awesome site for creating workflows and automations between a whole host of different services. I have a number of automations (IFTTT calls them applets) that use Tumblr as a destination and a “fedified” Tumblr would have let me automate a lot of posting without having to change a thing. Flipboard simply isn’t set up for that–not without workarounds or hacks (though IFTTT appears to have one that uses Pocket as an intermediary that I plan to try).

If this post has piqued your curiosity about Flipboard’s foray into the fediverse, I encourage you to check out Flipboard for yourself. Follow me there, comment on pieces I’ve flipped, create your own magazine(s), get the Flipboard mobile app and flip good pieces into Mastodon.

Everything Old is New Again: Social Bookmarking Edition

Posted on by Scott

According to this TechCrunch article, a Fediverse-powered successor to del.icio.us is now available. Back in the olden days of the web, I regularly posted links there to articles that I wanted to share or read later. I moved on from del.icio.us to Instapaper, and used it a ton (and actually read more of the content I saved there) because of the send-to-Kindle feature. Enough years have passed that I don’t recall exactly when I switched from using Instapaper to Pocket, but it might have had to do with original creator (Marco Arment) selling a majority stake to another company.

In the true spirit of the decentralized web, Postmarks is available as code in GitHub that you choose where to host (and connect to the Fediverse) yourself. Per the readme file, the creator of Postmarks put his thumb on the scale in favor of Glitch as a place to host your own instance. I played with Glitch briefly back in February when I first heard of it and found it to be a quick and powerful way to stand up new static or dynamic websites for whatever you wanted (within reason). So I started by visiting the default site the creator of Postmarks set up, pressing the Remix on Glitch button, and started renaming things per the instructions.

I used 1Password to generate the ADMIN_KEY and SESSION_SECRET values for my remix of Postmarks. I initially changed the username from the default (bookmarks) but since the Fediverse name Glitch-hosted sites resolve to is @bookmarks@project-name.glitch.me, I though the default (@bookmarks) worked quite well. Other changes I’ve made to the remix so far include changing the size of the read-only textbook on the About page with the site’s ActivityPub handle and changing the background color from pink to more of a parchment color.

Other minor changes I expect to make include:

  • Fonts
  • Unvisited and visited link colors

I’ve tried searching for the new handle with the Ivory client but it hasn’t shown up yet. There are other features I haven’t tried yet, like the Bookmarklet and Import bookmarks features that I will write about in a future post.