Yet Another Blog
I’ve been trying, and mostly failing, to start myself a blog for several years. I’m not sure if it’s the feeling of writing into the void or the ubiquity of well-adopted social media platforms, but there’s always something demoralizing that keeps me from actually posting to it… until I get the bug and spin up another blog for the millionth time to try again, anyway.
With the recent and ongoing implosion of Twitter and my techy interest in this new thing called the Fediverse, we’re hopping on that impulse train again. For my less nerdily inclined friends, the simple explanation of The Fediverse is that it contains websites that talk to each other, so if you’re on FaceTome and your friend is on Ghostr you can view each other’s posts and talk to each other without having to make more accounts for every platform.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but as anyone who’s heard about Mastodon lately can tell you: if you’re not excited about it, learning how it works feels like homework. We’re in that fun early-adopter stage where tech folks are marketing at tech folks and nobody’s hired a marketing firm or a UI team to make this stuff easy and approachable. If you’re interested but intimidated, just sign up for Mastodon.social – for all practical purposes it looks like Twitter and you can figure out all of the weird federation and instance stuff out as you go.
As for me, I’ve hooked this blog up using a handy plugin for ActivityPub, which means all of these posts should be available to people out there on Mastodon or Pleuroma or whatever other niche social instance – and I don’t have to sign up for yet another account on someone else’s website. If you’re anywhere in the Fediverse, you should be able to find me @scyoni@scyoni.com for now. I might get a more bespoke domain name at some point, but I want to see how much I use it, first.
The tech for viewing and responding to other people’s posts from here is a bit lacking right now, too, but the point of the blog was to have one place for me to post my stuff – so one thing at a time, I guess.
In the meantime, I don’t think missing out on the rage-posting and 280-character hot takes is going to hurt me much.