The technical news folks were posting this last night, long after most people were logged off social media or busy with stuff, but this little exchange resulted in a much lengthier explanation for us who are all struggling with a post-2022-Twitter fallout.
This article at TechCrunch titled, “Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps,” pretty much indicates that Tumblr is thinking forward about how to link better with the Fediverse.
There already is an app on wordpress.org for ActivityPub. Still not sure if there’s one for wordpress.com yet (but will look). But this coming for Automattic’s Tumblr is pretty exciting.
Should this happen people can come to Tumblr (presumably also wordpress.com or wordpress.org) to publish and share across to the greater Fediverse. They don’t need a hosted server, presumably because Tumblr is the greater server if I understand this at a high level. This is a potential game changer to make Mastodon more familiar to the internet at large and also pushes the idea of interoperability further along. The thing I’ve truly hated about a lot of social media is that “closed off / undiscoverable” piece of a lot of startups in addition to being completely barred to apps. Apps exclude a great deal of the world either due to lack of equipment, type of equipment, operating system, and essentially money. The internet was not intended to have a caste system, but does whenever we gate behind equipment or firewalls.
I’ve only been on Mastodon less than 2 weeks, thanks to the kindness of a FF14 discord group who purchased the hosting and are taking on that dreaded responsibility of explaining it to others. I’m not so in love with all the hoops of getting on but people in that community are kind and patient — very friendly and interactive. The FF14 community on mastodon is really into sharing screencaps and stuff about their characters, not unlike the community I see on instagram. Gpose is king no matter where you go I guess in the realm of social media.
As an aside, let me tell you something about mastodon on mobile. I got pointed towards the existence of non-official apps. I picked up metatext for iOS and am much happier with it as I can see my local host and the “greater fediverse” which right now doesn’t include very much. But it could allow me to see more people who I meet in random spaces without getting yet another app >.>
As for Tumblr? I had restarted a new tumblr for my ff14 stuff anyways years back , especially for some sketching and drawing. The tumblr has evolved a bit as I started making more product and art, but as I try to become more routinely active, I’m not quite clear what the mix of content will be over there and whether it will once again have more blog content. IDK yet. But going to try to test a cross-post of this to see if I can, in fact, push blog content that way. (It was broken last week, so consider this take two.)
I may not do this kind of cross post often, so don’t fret. But I’d like to keep the channels working if at all possible.
On a non-sequitur, I tried to figure out how to create subdomain installs on my webhost to see if I could set up this site over there (and shift to wordpress.org) but it’s so messy so I decided instead to just upgrade my plan here, remove ads, and put off the decision another year. I have some soul searching to do on what kind of content I’m going to focus on moving forward. It’ll take a while to figure that out.
The Swann Lodge 
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