Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.
It’s Ten Fourty Eight on a Monday and i have barely touched social media. I have barely touched social media for two reasons. People don’t see it as socialising anymore. They take a utilitarian approach to social media, which makes it absurd. The second reason is that we see how ignorant the world is about current affairs.
In the past when we used social media we were looking to have conversations, share ideas and do more.
Until the pandemic I used Facebook (FB), Twitter(TW) and Instagram(IG) daily. As pandemic solitude took its toll on me I dumped Facebook, and then I dumped Instagram. I started blogging again, and I continued to use Twitter for another two years, before finally dumping Twitter too.
Dumping Social Media Over Time For years I was a daily user of FB, TW and IG but as life became more solitary, and as trolling became more common, so it made sense to dump the social networks that made me suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Fediverse instances want you to pay them to use their services. This could be fantastic. It isn’t, for one simple reason. We are helping someone else grow their projects enough for them, eventually to get IPOs and sell off the company, and our contribution to the highest bidder for them to profit.
Zwift and Strava I liked Zwift and I liked Strava, until they raised venture funds, getting millions, on top of what we were already paying for the service.
A few weeks ago I was completely opposed to Threads being connected and accepted by the Fediverse because I hated the idea of 100 million users flooding a social network with 10 million users. Now that threads has imploded I feel differently.
Now that Threads is the same size as the Frediverse, or at least closer to being the same size, the impact of the two joining up would be diminished.
Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I’d take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future
Playing With WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s.
After my first post about playing with ClassicPress and the Fediverse it was suggested that I try the nightly build of ClassicPress so I did. The result can be seen here.
Mastodon and Firefish I have tested integration with the fediverse via Mastodon.social but also firefish.social and mastodon.social is faster, but mastodon.social eventually catches up. I tried posting a blog post, and commenting on blog posts and it works although not instantly.
Although I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve I have been experimenting with ClassicPress and the Fediverse, but rather than do it from my main blog I have decided to experiment within a subdomain and so far I have achieved much. I see that activitypub and webfinger can be installed on ClassicPress.
I checked that a webfinger was created and displayed correctly but this took trial and error. The biggest error is that to create a webfinger that is valid you must come from an https hyperlink.
Yesterday I experimented with migrating my blog from WordPress to ClassicPress to see whether ClassicPress plays nicely with the fediverse. It does but there is room for improvement.
If you want instructions on how to migrate from wordpress you can find the instructions here. Summarised, you download the switch to ClassicPress plugin, you run it, it checks that you’re ready to migrate, you fix what needs to be fixed, and when ClassicPress sees that you’re ready it will allow you to start the migration.
I started writing a post, but felt that it was too negative so I stopped, and now I’m writing this one. I want to explore the way in which Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit are still front and foremost on The Guardian Website, as well as many others.
As I write this Twitter has become x.com. Reddit has had several weeks of protests and Facebook reached over three billion users.