fediverse

Recommended talk: Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status

This week I came across a post recommending the talk from Molly White (@molly0xff) at SXSW, talking about “Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status“.

The abstract of the talk is: “The real power move for creators is ownership and control of their work and livelihoods. This freedom is actually closer for more people than ever before! Learn from two fediverse futurists how decentralized social media facilitates better publishing, community, and business models. These speakers will cover the theoretical and the practical, including how the landscape is evolving in 2025, where creators should focus their energies, and how they might thrive with or without “walled garden” social platforms.”

It’s an interesting talk, where she’s talking about how (and WHY) she keeps her content mainly on her website and federates it to some social networks for discovery.

How to selfhost Peertube

I’ve been thinking about selfhosting my videos for quite a while now. Sure, Youtube is the de-facto-standard. But honestly, I don’t perform on ANY platform that is steered by an algorithm, and I simply dislike the way those monopolies can “dictate” what is seen and can be seen. Elena Rossini recently wrote a nice post about it, that nails it quite well. I know: I don’t pay for it, so what should I expect …

Anyways! I hesitated for quite a while to rent a VPS, install Peertube, maybe according databases, redirect a subdomain, keep it maintained … ah well … or maybe just not.

But – also thank you to Elena Rossini (@_elena@mastodon.social) – I got aware of YunoHost:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming to simplify server administration and therefore democratize self-hosting while making sure it stays reliable, secure, ethical and lightweight. It is a copylefted libre software project maintained exclusively by volunteers. Technically, it can be seen as a distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and can be installed on many kinds of hardware.

And I must admit that I really liked the setup procedure! It’s well described in the Yunohost Documentation and worked like a charm.

If you are afraid of self-hosting any application listed in the YunoHost App-Store … DON’T be afraid. VPCs/VPSs are really cheap to get as well … I chose a tiny VPC from Strato for example.

See the result on https://video.franzgraf.de/

Give it a try! Self-hosting might be easier than you think.

Is it worth joining Mastodon?

These days I just hit the mark of 1500 followers on my photography account @hikingdude@mastodon.social on Mastodon.

That’s really – great, satisfying, surprising. Choose whatever you want. For an influencer on other platforms (the Entertainment media) this might not be a lot. But.. Wait…

Brasil’s Twitter/X ban shows once more an over centralized system

If you haven’t heard about it, on August 31st 2024 Brasil banned Twitter/X nationwide (see BBC, NYTimes, TheVerge).

There are numerous debates about the whys etc. But for this post I don’t care. My point here is: it once more shows the massive downside of such a centralized system.

“Death to the Algorithm” a recommended read

I just came across Jeffrey’s post “Death to the Algorithm | Jeffrey Inscho” and I so resonate with it!

Social Media Platforms vs Entertainment Platforms?

I often like to listen / read when someone tells about his or her experience on different social media platforms. And when it comes to Mastodon, I’ve noticed a recurring theme: Many users describe how other social networks fill their timelines with entertaining or funny content and that they were missing this in the beginning of their “Mastodon-experience”.

And at some point I thought by myself: “Wait wait wait – Are we still talking about social networks?” Is it the purpose of a social network to keep me entertained? I mean – this isn’t the expectation from my real-world-social-network, is it?

Mastodon is how the Web should be: OPEN

TL;DR: just add “.rss” to a mastodon profile or tags or user-tags to get an RSS stream! My photography profile @hikingdude@mastodon.social for example can easily be followed by an RSS Reader by following https://mastodon.social/@hikingdude.rss.

No account required! And that’s not even the end! 🤯

How to make ActivityPub plugin publish WordPress posts

In general it should be super simple to federate WordPress posts to the fediverse: Just simply install and activate the ActivityPub WordPress plugin and there you go.