This morning I received the message that WordPress.com blogs now can activate themselves to be available via ActivityPub. Which means they can be followed and commented directly from fediverse applications like Mastodon, FireFish, Pleroma, or any of the other dozens or hundreds applications activated on it.
That’s actually quite cool, I have been on there for a year or so now, ever since that mess at twitter started, and I have enjoyed my time there a lot. Unlike twitter the fragmentation of the whole experience into many smaller communities that can mostly freely interact with each other makes for a very relaxed experience. When I started people claimed that it was not important which server to start on, because you could just follow people from any other server, but let me tell you, having for a local community makes for a stark difference.
It’s not like I disliked toot.community, where I started, but I felt like I was missing a lot of tabletop-roleplaying discussion. And I was right, moving to dice.camp put me right into a community that was talking about the things I was interested in and wanted to talk about. And yes, technically there should be no difference, but there is a local feed and a federated feed on Mastodon, and having access to all those other ttrpg people right there on the local feed did in fact make a difference.
But that’s something I really like about the experience, interacting with people who are interested in the same things as you, who are also interacting with people on other servers that have the same interests, making for interesting clusters of thematically close interest groups.
There are a few other great things about it, which I noticed when I quickly tried out tumblr last week. I was so used to Content Warnings on the fedi for example that I inadvertently stumbled into an area of tumblr with hardcore gore and porn. I got so used to these things blurred out and tagged appropriately that I forgot other sites don’t have that.
Now to be fair, the fediverse is not ideal. There are issues. Instead of a faceless megacorporation now a faceless person with an unknown agenda has your account on their server. And you are dependent on them.
You also can mute and block people, but that does not keep them from responding to comments to your posts, but now you are left out of the discussion.
The whole structure seems much more geared for that smaller kind of network it was before the great twitter migrations happened.
As people have put it: the great thing about the fediverse is that everybody can start their own server, the bad thing about the fediverse is that EVERYBODY can start their own server.
Anyway, there are different services that are available on the fediverse. They all can interact with each other, sometimes to varying degrees.
My main account is on dice.camp, a roleplaying game focused Mastodon instance, but I also have an active Pixelfed account where I share photos I made. Both also can be followed by rss feed, which is neat.
Sometimes I post stuff to KBin or Lemmy, but all of them can be interacted with from my other accounts.
Here’s a short overview of a few apps, all of them have different servers with different target audiences (if interested, check more under fediverse.party):
- Mastodon: microblogging service, the biggest service right now due to the mess at twitter, although has a different vibe
- Pixelfed: image sharing service a bit like Instagram.
- FireFish: microblogging/image sharing
- Pleroma/Akkoma: more lightweight microblogging (often more for shitposting)
- KBin and Lemmy: link share applications, similar to reddit.com
- Bookwyrm: book review app, similar to Goodreads
- WriteFreely and Plume (and, well, WordPress): blog platforms
- Friendi.ca: more Facebook-like interface for the fediverse
- PeerTube: video sharing platform
- CastoPod: podcasting platform
And here are a few ttrpg related servers:
There are more. I had a whole list down when I started a year ago, but if you want to check it out, this should help.
Dave J @davej@dice.camp
Profoundly Nerdy @profoundlynerdy@infosec.exchange
sillycat @officialsillycat@mastodon.social
Peter B @peter_b@im-in.space
Thomas S. @noire_munich@mastodon.social
sigilbound @_sigilbound_@defcon.social
Peter B @PeterB@ieji.de
Holos Discover @HolosDiscover@discover.holos.social
Ricardo Wang @RicardoWang@mastodon.social
Valinard @Valinard@im-in.space
Stuffed Crocodile 
One response to “It’s the small things…”
I love me some IT FTW. It reminds me of the Game Master made stupid by “its” programming from rulebooks. Paint-within-the-lines-according-to-the-numbers will never produce a work of art, it will never create an unique flourishing experience for the individual; just reproduce an experience someone else had for the masses, like video games – creating a barrier between the confidence to produce some one requires to create their own artwork and the oppressive self-doubts causing one to plagurize another’s. Whole industries thrive on self-doubts: consulting, self-help, automation IT, Satanic panics, role-playing games….
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