Finally up and running with an Akkoma instance now. Will play around with this for a week or two but chances are this will become my primary account in the end.
If you haven't been following along I've been frustrated with Mastodon consuming too much server capacity, and have wanted to try something more suited for a single-user instance.
My research led me here, and by truly pushing the boundaries of my server skills I managed to set up my own #Akkoma instance.
It's not pretty (not much Fediverse software seems to be), but it gives me a lot more control in a much more streamlined install. I will likely design my own theme for it as well.
Ya the default Pleroma-FE interface doesn't look great, it's definitely one of those things that is "function over form" type deals. Luckily, the design of #Pleroma (and by extension #Akkoma as it is a fork of Pleroma) is that it is modular enough that changing frontend interfaces is relatively simple.
If you're up for an adventure, take a look at #Mangane, which is a front-end designed to look more modern and frankly, more like Twitter. It's a fork of Soapbox which is included in Akkoma but Mangane is aiming to add Akkoma specific features that are missing in Soapbox. Their dev team seems to be quite responsive to feature requests as well.
Only thing is that the Akkoma dev team doesn't support this fork so if you run into issues, they would want you to change your FE back before they'll support you.
Also, if you want something even more lightweight for single user instances, check out #GoToSocial and #Takahe as well. They're currently in active development (not feature complete) but they're designed to be very lightweight even compared to Pleroma (which is lightweight compared to #Misskey and esp. #Mastodon). Like Pleroma, they also support the Mastodon Client #API.
The more I use different #fediverse apps, the more I feel that we are on the edge of a different future, in the early stages of something that we haven't seen before.
In the last few months, I've used #Mastodon, #Misskey, #Calckey, #Funkwhale, #lemmy, #Peertube, #Bookwyrm and #Pixelfed. Soon, I'm going to try an install of #kbin. In the not too distant future, we will see #GreatApe bringing more options for video chat to the Fediverse. There are countless more platforms that I haven't had a chance to try.
The network formed by the interconnections between those apps is the Fediverse; a Federated Universe. Federated, because everything out there is connected with everything else, in one giant network. What I am truly beginning to appreciate is just how real that vision is, and just how disruptive to our future it's going to be. More than a truism, these the fediverse platforms really will allow us to see and interact with nearly anything else out there.
The platform we use no longer determines the information we can access; it doesn't build walls around us. Instead, what out choice of platform determines, is how we interact with information, rather than determining what information we are able interact with in the first place. The walls in the walled garden haven't so much been torn down, as simply never built.
I can write a blog post, and someone on Mastodon can reply to it. I can make a group post on lemmy, and someone from Calckey can reply to it. I can see an awesome photo on Pixelfed, bring it in to #Akkoma and boost it for everyone else to see. And then anyone who sees it can interact with it.
The cross platform interactions are still imperfect. Standards are still being developed, code is still being written and features are still being defined, but the future is right here, we are on the cusp of something new and amazing.
Of course, this is all old news to someone who has been part of the fediverse for years now, but it feels different now. The momentum is here, we are seeing a shift and I think once we cross that precipice, once we have normalised the cross channel interactions we are starting to develop, it's going to be very hard to go back.
If an actor provides an outbox URL, but not an inbox URL, it means that it cannot receive Follow activities and it can not push content to the followers. In such cases, the follower's server should switch to periodic polling like RSS.
This will enable statically-built blogs ( #jekyll#hugo etc) to appear in Mastodon network.
#Obisidian - helped me build my #PKM & task management system. Before, I was app hopping, searching for THE ONE. #ObsidianMD has been The One for me!
#Mastodon - Before, #Twitter was the only #SocialMedia I used regularly but reluctantly. Then I found Mastodon & it actually made me happy to talk to people.
I feel like it's worth mentioning, re; quote-boosts/QTs, that we can't "just add the feature to Mastodon" in a federation - it's a lot more complicated than a lot of people seem to realise?
The argument about whether or not we should add QTs is an important one, but once we get past that there's the issue of federation.
Mastodon is one software of many using the ActivityPub "skeleton" code. If ActivityPub doesn't have QTs in its code and Mastodon adds a QT feature, any non-Mastodon software (or even server) has to work out how to interpret Mastodon's QTs. If it isn't Mastodon-compatible, QTs will just break. They might even break in a way that harms the person being QTed. And what if someone on another server boosts/reblogs that broken QT?
Also, since we on Mastodon can follow people who are using federated software that isn't Mastodon (e.g. instances/softwares that look and behave like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc), how does that work? Would people on Mastodon be able to QT people on not-Mastodon? How are the OPs going to feel about that? Would they even get notifications about it, since QTs aren't in the ActivityPub "skeleton" of federation?
And since we're a federation of separate servers even "within" Mastodon, there's also the question of how older/outdated Mastodon servers will handle incoming QTs. If you're on an older version of Mastodon and you follow someone on a newer instance and they QT someone, what would that look like? Maybe someone has intentionally chosen a fork of Mastodon with QTs turned off. Can people on other softwares QT them, and how would they feel about that?
This is where I start my day with a cup of coffee and a #book while listening to the birds and admiring the view of the hills and the city. I feel extremely blessed to live here.
Fortunately, as I am posting this on #Mastodon I don't have to worry about people hating me for posting my good fortune* 😆
It occurs to me that #mastodon would be a good place to play #morningtoncrescent, although might need to invoke the #isihac protocol to work out who's go it is 🤔
Just remember to quoit to the right and mind the gap
I have a friend who has experienced so much racism and surveillance that she's wary of using social media at all. I was thinking that a server run by and for Muslims like herself might be a safer place to plug in.
Please share suggestions or RT if your followers might know. Thanks!
BTW, if you're a developer looking to get started writing things that interface with Mastodon and the Fediverse, WITHOUT jumping head-first into the ActivityPub spec, Mastodon's creator @Gargron wrote some extremely helpful blog posts.
I am a professor of #economics, esp. #publicfinance at the #KU Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in #Ingolstadt in Southern #Germany . Most of my research is about #taxes, esp. corporate taxation and tax evasion. I'll toot about tax policy and economic policy more generally, about academia, and being a mom in academia.
I'm part of the #twittermigration and curious to see where all of this heading.
Bleary-eyed and jaded, she decided she'd had enough. The memories of better times lingered, but she realized they were just that, memories. She was living in the past, aching for things to return to the way they used to be when she needed to move on. So, she closed up her home on Twitter, moved to a different platform, and started over. So many new faces! And she found herself getting lost more than once. But she knew it would all become familiar soon enough. #Welcome #Mastodon
*Romance is often viewed as smut's distant respectable cousin, but sex scenes are sex scenes, & we all have common cause in a puritanical world with growing censorship & deplatforming.
I’m absolutely chuffed to be a triple finalist in the Asia Pacific Photography Awards this year! And I owe special thanks to Mastodon - I wasn’t going to enter the spoonbill image until a lovely comment from @BirdsinLatin encouraged me to do so. I love this community. ❤️
I haven't been on #Mastodon for long, but it has generally been a better experience than #Twitter.
One thing that concerns me, though, is "This profile has been hidden by the moderators of...".
I click "Show profile anyway" and can't see anything that might be considered objectionable.
It seems that this pro is also a con... Individual moderators can hide objectionable content, but we're always subject to what someone else also considers objectionable.