- I’m stoked about this time around. I haven’t been as excited in the past mostly because I was turned off by how much quieter it was than Twitter (read: it didn’t fuel the addiction well enough). This time around, it’s still quieter, but I’m more ready for the quiet. And it’s not too quiet. I’d say pretty much all my favorite people are there!
- I think if Twitter were to literally shut down, Mastodon is a perfectly nice replacement. I love Discord. I love blogging. But I like the little-text-burst-with-simple-social-features too, quite a bit. Ughck look at me I’m even blogging like that right now.
- I’m on the server front-end.social. I’m following their internal discussions about how to think about managing invites, approvals, and overall size. It’s all very thoughtful. I know for sure, it’s not trying to be the one true front-end instance and wants to encourage everyone to arrange their own. It doesn’t matter that much on Mastodon anyway. The spirit of it is to, ya know, federate. I literally have no advice on which instance you should join, but I’m sure people with more experience than me can help.
- I’m a little jealous of the people who went one step further and self-host their own private instance. They get their own URLs! Nice! Although then you kinda miss out on the “local” timeline of a shared-interest instance, not to mention the personal technical debt.
- What is the best way to link to yourself on Mastodon, in a “come follow me” sense? Just like this? https://front-end.social/web/@chriscoyier
- I really dislike the “Toot” verbiage. I generally like whimsical stuff, but a fart joke at the very heart and soul of an app is maybe too far.
- It’s nice I can kick WordPress posts over there automatically as I can with Jetpack + Twitter.
- I really love how the openness of it means there are all sorts of clients to try. I’ve been using Pinafore on my desktops. It’s nice and fast. I’ve been enjoying adding my own custom CSS to it via the Arc browser. There are also like 10 choices on iOS. I’ve only tried Mastodon and Toot! so far, and they are both OK but looking forward to trying more. It’s like bouncing around RSS readers! Fun!
I think personally just using your profile works best for linking. The “toot” nomenclature came from Eugen where it was like an elephant tooting its nose like a trumpet. He didn’t realize it meant “fart” in English. The official name is actually “post” now, but the old name is still used colloquially.
Yep, linking to the URL of your profile is best. https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier (without the /web/ part, even)
It works as a link per se but also finds your profile to follow when you search the URL in the Mastodon interface.
“Toot” is not a fart joke. Mastodon’s are related to elephants. The noise an elephant makes is equated by the Mastodon software developers as a toot sound – like tweet is a bird sound. That is the reasoning behind it.
I really dislike the “Toot” verbiage, too. To me, it doesn’t matter what the original idea was. The result is there’s a direct connection baked into Mastodon to the kind of language that’s often used to bully people and gatekeep who is welcome in a space. Given the history of bully and gatekeeping people out of the tech industry with immature “humor” often attributed to teen boy culture, I’m all for getting rid of “toot” everyplace possible.
Check out the ActivityPub plugin. I’m super intrigued by the idea of a WordPress blog being a way to interact with the Fediverse, including federated comments.
I’ve got that installed I just don’t really get it yet.
So, it literally will make your site visible on sites that use ActivityPub. In other words, I could literally follow your blog on Mastodon. If I comment on the post on Mastodon, it will translate as a comment on your site. It does more than that, but that’s some of the outstanding bits I’ve noticed. Also check out webmentions!