adactio.com on Mastodon

I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017, but now my website is on there too. I’m @[email protected]. My website is @[email protected]—search for adactio.com in your Mastodon client of choice.

What’s the difference? Well, with my mastodon.social account, I’m syndicating stuff—most of my notes, and all of my journal—and including a link back to the original source here on my site. With the adactio.com account, it is the original source.

I thought about migrating over to my adactio.com account from my mastodon.social account, but I actually like having a separate profile. I browse Mastodon a lot more than I post, and browsing is a lot easier to do with a regular account.

If you’d like your website to be available on Mastodon, Bridgy Fed is the magic tool that makes it available. You’ll need to be able to send webmentions, and you’ll need to configure some .well-known directives. If you’ve you’ve already got webmention-sending set up, it’s all quite straightforward (though you will also need to update your HTML to include a link back to fed.brid.gy in each entry you want syndicated).

For some reason the syndication didn’t seem to be working at first, but then when I followed @[email protected] from my @[email protected] account, it started working. Maybe there needs to be at least one follower.

Also, my links don’t seem to be showing up on Mastodon even though it looks like everything is posting okay. Not sure what that is about.

Anyway, if you want to follow me on Mastodon, you now have a choice. There’s me, @[email protected], or there’s my website, @[email protected].

Mastodon is just blogs

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

This is spot-on:

Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.

Where have all the websites gone? – Chris Coyier

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

Get Blogging!

Your easy guide to starting a new blog.

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

Increasing the surface area of blogging

RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.

But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.

RSS - Chris Coyier

How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to respond to me, publish something linking to what I said. If I want to respond to you, I publish something linking to what you wrote. Old school. Good school. It’s high-effort, but I think the required effort is a positive thing for a social network. Forces you to think more.