New Fediverse Bluesky bridge in beta testing

An 8bit image of a new bridge opening with a mastodon walking across while a group of people are happy to cross and hang out

The bridge has been built and the switch has been turned on! Even though there was a lot of struggle and strife, arguments, and knockdown-drag-outs, @snarfed.org@snarfed.org, AKA Ryan Barrett persevered by taking into account everyone's opinions on what a cross-fediverse bridge between the ActivityPub powered landscape dominated by Mastodon and the ATProto protocol that powers BlueSky. It's important to many people including myself that all networks in what I call the Open Social Media Services (OpenSNS) collection of decentralized federated networks be able to talk and interact with each other; else we might as well just go on creating big-ass tech silos that eventually will wall people off based on pre-existing factors like ethnicity, geography, culture at best and/or consolidate power to just one group of people or companies at worse. But I've talked ad-nauseam about this in other postings already; it's time to talk about how this thing works!

1️⃣ Getting ready to cross

Whether you're coming from ActivityPub/Mastodon and friends or ATProto/Bluesky, the first part is the same: You need to follow the bot that will register your OpenSNS username with Bridgy's servers. This will count as an intent on your part that you wish your posts to be popped over to the other side.

  • For 🐘 ActivityPub accounts interacting with 🦋 ATProto, follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy and

    your bridged ATproto username is @[username.server.tld].bsky.brid.gy

  • For ATProto accounts interacting with 🐘 ActivityPub, follow @ap.brid.gy and your bridged ActivityPub username is @[username]@bsky.brid.gy

🚧 At some point there's going to be a message that will also let you know you've done this right after you registered sent to your existing account in the form of a unlisted message, but for now just head over to your new user page manually:

  • 🐘 for ActivityPub users, your bridged user page is https://fed.brid.gy/ap/@[username]@[server name].[tld]

  • 🦋 for ATProto users, your bridged user page can be found at https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/[username]

There, you can even add followers and check logs to see if something isn't working properly with syncing.

2️⃣ Let's hop across the bridge

At this point things should be up and running and you really don't have to do much; the system will poll somewhere between every 5~10 minutes looking for new posts to translate to the other side from you. Of course it's in early beta right now, so it's polling whenever Ryan gets around to it while he makes changes and works out the kinks. I recommend having an account on your target SNS site just so you can see the output and make sure it shows up correctly. There's also a handy RSS output in your Bridgy userpage that you can subscribe to and keep track of things as well.
It's a simple bridge really-- you post in one place and it translates and posts it in the other place. If you get activity on that post in the other place, it rolls back to you wherever you are.

3️⃣ Following across the bridge

If you want to follow someone else in the other place, you need to know how their username translates just as in 1️⃣ above. Here's some examples:

  • You're a Mastodon user wanting to follow my Bluesky account @starrwulfe.xyz, then you need to search for @starrwulfe.xyz@bsky.brid.gy in your user search engine on Mastodon or in the app, just you'd do for a normal user.
  • You're a Bluesky user wanting to follow my Mastodon account @starrwulfe@social.vivaldi.net, then you need to search for @starrwulfe.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy in the Bluesky users search field.

There's a bit more to it, so please read the docs to get a good understanding:

A large mastodon and butterfly stand at a bridge entrance while cars and people cross.

4️⃣ Construction Notices

This is a very early beta. I outlined the core feature set, but there are some such as more interactive onboarding and opt-in notices that aren't in production yet. Also polling is being done manually by Ryan as he works out kinks in the program and scales things up. Expect lots of changes in the next few weeks as use cases roll in and traffic is shaped. You can be a part of the process though by filing issue comments on the Github for the project:

5️⃣ Enjoy the scenery!

I'd like to thank Ryan for taking the time out of his... well life really. Bridgy has been a free service he's operated to enable the crossposting across different social media and blogs since 2017. This blog is half powered by it whenever someone comments via Bluesky and Mastodon! He charges $0 and while he insists it's a negligible cost to keep the infrastructure up, his rapid response to problems and ability to chat about how it works anytime has gotta be a serious time weight, passion project or not. This endeavor is very much appreciated and highly valued by me and lots more, I'm sure. 🙇🏾‍♂️

Also, be sure to catch his Flipboard/Dot Social interview if you'd like to know more about the project and the rollercoaster ride around it.

Since I would love to have Telegram be a first party “citizen” of the Fediverse, the network of open social media network apps and sites that are connected with ActivityPub, I formally opened a suggestion for it to be added somehow if possible via the Telegram user suggestion portal.
I think it would be great if every Telegram user was able to tie into the #fediverse via making @username@t.me handles and using group chats/channels equate different conversation activities vis-a-vis Lemmy, Flipboard and Discourse.

bugs.telegram.org/c/39431

Promises made, promises kept.

Threads post as seen from a mastodon account

Messing around with Bluesky post embedding codes

Per this post, I’m testing some ways to embed Bluesky posts into my Wordpress powered site here. As I find other ways, I’ll add them here.

Simple Blog Card using a shortcode and plugin: [simpleblogcard url="bsky.app/profile/k…"]

Bluesky.lol snippet creation using javascript:

Skyview.social snippet creation using iframes:

On the subject of Connecting Federated Social Media Networks

The past few days on the Fediverse have served to remind me a few things:

  1. The internet is as smart and as ignorant (and everything in between) as the macrocosm known as "human civilization" reflects upon it.
  2. Sometimes the victims will become the victimizers in any given situation, usually without them being aware of it.
  3. Upon pointing it out to said type above, instead of working to acknowledge and understand, they will double-down under the guise of righteousness, again unwittingly using the exact playbook that they had been persecuted under at some point in the past.
  4. As usual, any attempt by a rational third party to diffuse whatever situation breaking out on the internet will lead to a wider conflict/argument/brigade session where everyone winds up digging their heels in and missing entirely the point.
  5. And finally, as usual, there's a 95% chance it was started by someone who was all to ready to be triggered by anything and everything so they could start some shit on the internet at that moment.

OK, with that preamble out the way, let's get into the latest drama related iconically to trying to bridge this patchwork, fledgling open social media landscape. As you may be aware, there are two federated decentralized social media protocols that are pretty big right now; ActivityPub and ATProto. Per my previous notes on both:

  • ActivityPub is a federated social networking protocol that enables users to interact across different servers and platforms used by popular projects like Mastodon, Pleroma, and PeerTube. It's been around since 2017 and is born from previous projects like Statusnet and Ostatus. It's in full federation right now, mainly serving as the underpinning to Mastodon, a microblogging server.
  • ATProto is a newer protocol developed by Bluesky, a public benefit company born from the ideas from former Twitter engineers. The protocol's main advantage is that it provides true account portability and can scale up with search and discovery. Since it was originally developed to be the successor to Twitter, it also has hooks for composable moderation and algorithms. It's not federated at the moment, but the only instance using it, the self-titular Bluesky (bsky.app) says "its immenent. Indeed, the company just took down the waitlist and opened up registration to everyone worldwide a few weeks ago.
OIG1.jpg

So what the hell happened?

In short, someone built something that can connect both networks together in a sense and a bunch of people who likely don't really know the technology's underpinnings instead proceeded to blow up their victim status to trigger everyone else and brigade the developer who was asking for constructive dialoge and ideas before he got too far in the development process.

Now I must note, I've been using Ryan's Bridgy site and suite of crossposting tools ever since I got into the Indieweb movement as it ticks all my boxes for making my content go all over the web and whatever comments and discussions take place out there, I can track and archive them on my site without worrying if I'll get taken down, or the site goes dark. Bridgy already has bridges for Mastodon, Reddit, Facebook, and even supported Instagram and Twitter before they became… drunk with power. I am eagerly awaiting the day when I can sit on Bluesky and follow Mastodon folks or sit on Mastodon and comment on Bluesky posts… Or better yet, tag everyone in both places from this blog right here. ActivityPub and ATProto are open source and its pretty easy to make tools like this unlike feeling around in the dark with undocumented APIs that may get shut down at any second; That's why we can't do this with Instagram!

It's no secret the fediverse is the social media of choice for those who feel voiceless and vulnerable on the other "big" networks; you can gain a sense of community and comradery on an instance with others sharing the same experiences. However, it is still a social network.

  • Social: relating to or involving activities in which people spend time talking to each other or doing enjoyable things with each other.
  • Network: a system of devices, or entities including people and animals that are connected and can communicate with each other.

So in regard to having a bridge to connect the two together… Yeah, it's kind of a no-brainer and I thought everyone else was looking forward to having it like myself. Boy was I wrong:

You need to make this opt IN not opt OUT. It absolutely fucking sucks that you want to force the majority of decentralized posts here into content for Jack fucking Dorsey.

Cyrus (still a bit spooky tbh) (@Cyrus@zirk.us)

honestly fuck you. Do you really expect everybody to have enough space in their bios to opt-out of your fucking bs? How many opt-out bs am I supposed to put there?

Joshix 🦣 (@joshix@fosspri.de)

 

unsplash

My Take:

I honestly don't get the vitrolic knee-jerk posts I saw coming left and right from some corners of the fediverse, then I started noticing the pattern: It's mostly people not understanding what the goals of both ActivityPub and ATProto are as a protocol and their equating it to Mastodon and Bluesky as "psudo-corporations" that have some level of control… And even perhaps Ryan's attempt to bridge both protocols with free and open source software that is literally already working to bridge other social networks as I type this, as some imaginary invasion mob coming to victimize them on the internet. 😓

Allow me to say this as a member of a marginalized group of people in real life who has had my share of internet trolls come at me: (I'm a Black man from the USA, and I have yet to lose my Black Card, am a refugee repping #BlackTwitter into the Fediverse on both Bsky and Masto so I think I can speak on some things.)

  1. Get out of your feelings. The animosity is unwarranted and uncalled for. This is the internet and it wasn't designed for you to have your entire-ass identity tied to it. This is truely the reason social media is some bullshit sometimes. The internet is supposed to be a communication tool, not some MMORPG for y'all to live your whole existence. If anything, your IRL personality should extend INTO it, not the other way around. Dude could've just cut the bridge on, posted Github links and lol'd all the way to the way to the next project and there wouldn't be much you or I could say; the fediverse has no Ts&Cs to violate!
  2. Attempt to learn the technology before you postulate whatever opinions around it. Don't come up with some off-the-cuff hot take on how you think the bridge is suddenly going to aim 3 million users of Network A at your posts on being a furry/inanimate-curious who happens to be in a cross-species relationship with a hubcap from a 1993 Chevy Corsica that happen to be publicly available on Network B. That's not how network bridges work. Understand that whatever you've posted publicly anywhere is subject to someone reading it and deciding to give you a like or give a hateful comment. They don't need a bridge to do it; they can already just make an account on the network you're already on and fuck with you. It's actually easier for them and less traceable!
  3. We already have bridges now. Consider this post is on my own personal blog powered by Wordpress. It's being cross-posted POSSE-style to wherever you're reading this or got referred from, whether it was through an automatic script, or I manually cut and pasted over. My blog is already acting as a bridge and there are many others like it. It's been that way in the past, and someone was bound to create this technology. If it's not @snarfed, then it'll be someone else. But mark my words, it's gonna happen.
  4. Learn the difference between protocols and applications. Bluesky is an application on the ATProto protocol. Mastodon is an application on the ActivityPub protocol. Both are facets of the wider fediverse. Don't conflate these things. This blog is an application on BOTH those protocols and also does webmentions and other cool things. Once ATProto is fully federated and opened, it's only a matter of time before I can snag an ATProto plugin in the same manner as the ActivityPub one and have it not even need to rely on a "translator" like Bridgy for that part. (If I just lost you with the technobabble, now you see why it's important to seek to understand this technology before reacting to some perceived threat.)
  5. You're not in a walled garden on the fediverse. You're in the open and as such you more than anyone should understand and respect the right to choose. The power here is in your hands and you have the ability to block, but your right to do so ends at the tip of your own nose and doesn't come anywhere near mine. Also realize both ActivityPub and ATProto were designed for openness first; if you seek privacy and isolation, then you need to grab Signal and create some rooms there with some buddies away from the open internet.
  6. Assholes exist everywhere. Don't conflate the tech of one place with the ability to keep bigots, fascists, bullys, and jackasses from your timeline. Moreover, don't shoo away people that are trying to do things that are inevitable anyway from doing it correctly! Understand federation is going to happen with or without your input if not by this project, by someone else. There's no hiding, there's no "safe place" except the one you create and control yourself within or without these places.

Letting you connect to other people you care about is not unethical or immoral. You have a lot of options for whether you want to participate in the BS bridge–either by managing your follows directly, by blocking users from that domain, or by blocking the whole domain. This is how federation works. You have absolute control over who you interact with.

Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)

 

I'm approaching this line of thinking from my longtime use, contribution and propagation of FOSS/open-source software and the use of my actual social media of choice, the indieweb which is best summed up here:

The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity.

tantek.com

 

Also, one more thing:

The most important lesson, I've ever learned about online privacy is this one: If you want something to be private online, don't put it online in the first place.

DavidB (@DavidBHimself)

Updates & Errata

Pardon the typos, grammar bombs and double negatives in my "stream of consciousness" manner of writing this particular post. My years of journalism prowess still requires fresh eyes and a fresher cup of coffee. Being that this is my blog and not a column in a major publication, I'm a bit lax so 🤷🏾‍♂️ ...fuhgeddaboudit!

🆕 Some other posts I've been reading that align with my opinions and have some additional references, and deeper information:

What's the difference between a blog and a social posting site?

This is gonna be a radical and controversial statement but in 2024, anything posted to the internet at-large, should be considered a “social post”. In fact, the same could be said for anything posted on the internet in 1994 too. Only the technology and methodology, and yes, nomenclature along with vernacular has changed. We don’t “upload to a site” or “update via FTP” so much anymore; we simply “post to the internet” or “tweet/tiktok/instagram” something. But the same effect is true once it leaves our thoughtstreams and becomes pixels/waveforms/electrons circuiting the internet: if the content is interesting to someone, it’s going to be interacted with _whether you realize it or not.

This may be the rub for a lot of folks, especially those in marginalized and vunerable groups-- how to be able to post something online without fear of harassment? How to put forth valuable (or just ancecdotal) content, opine, or just shoot the breeze without catching a flamestorm? I get it-- I’m a card-carrying African-American, and we constantly catch hell from certain factions whenever we bring up uncomfortable truths, both online and IRL. Being able to have a refuge where one can air out an incedient, write about something experienced, or just vent --without persecution-- should be an inalienable right! …right? I think so, but also I’m not sure the internet is that place, at least in the sense that protection in the form of someone not having a view counter to yours won’t get all stalky, bitchy and rageful about it won’t be there. There’s always the risk a “keyboard warrior” or worse will show up with that bullshit and start harrassing the OP and everyone else. Anytime you post anything even a gnat-booty-hair towards controversial, assume you’re gonna draw these people out, no matter how protected you think your space is.

Sushil Nash/Unsplash

The people of Manchester break lockdown to join the global Black Lives Matter protests. <p><a href=https://unsplash.com/photos/man-in-black-and-white-crew-neck-t-shirt-g8yJjfQrOJA" style=“border-radius:10px”>
Sushil Nash/Unsplash

Now of course you should expect someone to reply, repost, and click on all the icons to make your post go "brrrr" if you're on a social media site somewhere, but what happens when you've commented on a blog that happened to be tied to a social media network and your comment gets exposed to a wider audience? Some argue there's an expectation that one's comments in places like blogs, forums and other so-called "closed discussion sites" shouldn't show up in other places unexpectedly and there's a reasonable expectiation that "what's commented there, stays there."

Are Blog Comments considered Social Media?

My opinion has always been and will remain the exact 180º opposite: Anything you post online is liable to be propagated, remixed, rebroadcast, and otherwise indexed somewhere, and wherever that some_where_ may be, some_one_ may be talking about it if there’s enough interest. This includes the main post and any ancillary posts (comments) about it. The internet is a public square and while there may be buildings and paths branching off of it, I always assume whatever I say in one place (an instagram post for example) will wind up being discussed in other place (on twitter). This actually happens all the time, even from the social media silos like TikTok and Facebook. For example, I don’t have a Tiktok account, no have I ever felt the need to have one because almost all the content I’m interested in coming from there, winds up being reposted on Instagram or YouTube anyway.

What’s a blog in 2024?

This blog in particular is also an ActivityPub instance. Pretty much all the posts from here can also be tracked at by searching for and following @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.xyz in the client of your choice (which at the time of this writing, likely means a Mastodon instance, but there’s lots out there!) Local commenting is not allowed, but you can interact with the post from anyplace you see in the syndication line (denoted by the links after 📡🔀) It’s also a full-fledged #indieweb site with Webmention commenting as well; you can post on your own site and it will find its way here as well. (there’s a textbox on the page if you don’t have webmentions set up on your blog locally; just put a link to this post somewhere in your reply, then read the instructions there and I’ll handle the rest!

I try to PESO my posts and POSSE the resulting comments so what may appear as one article here is really the nexus of a cloud of similar posts elsewhere (for example Facebook, BlueSky and Micro.Blog) and their resulting discussions all filter back here, the “primary” article.

So.. Is a connected website the "future of blogging"?

…When was a website ever NOT connected? 😜

Content Creators: Substack's dumpster fire should also be the one lit underneath your @$$

If 2010-2020 was the Great Social Media Consolidation, looks like 2022 and beyond are gonna be the Great Innanet Decentralization, and I’m 1oo% present for it. Thanks to our friends #indieweb and #fediverse, you already know how easy it is to plug into some great communities on the interwebs while keeping your content under your control and being able to keep a record of the dialog around it at your own site.

If you’re reading this on my website, then just look down where on a traditional blog there’d be a “leave a comment” doohickey there for you to fill out a form and say how you feel about what you read. But here you can just comment on any of the syndicated sites where this same content exists and it’ll find its way back here via “a series of tubes” I’ve arranged. And with some hacky tomfoolery, my comments here will flow back to wherever they need to go in most places. To me, this is what real social media is supposed to be like– Your media on in a space you control and interact with the right circle of people you want to see it. And if you want, you can network your site with others, forming a mesh network of sites. That’s the premise (and promise) of decentralized social networking I’ve stressed again and again here.

SpongeBob SquarePants, a cartoon character, getting up from a chair with a caption that reads “IGHT IMMA HEAD OUT”.

Today one of my “transit content” friends I’ve followed for years is finding out first had why this is a good idea, thanks to the whole Substack debacle. Reece Martin (@rm_transit@mstdn.social) who runs RMTransit on YouTube experienced this firsthand by having to make the hard decision to move his popular Substack newsblog to Wordpress, but to me that means he just upgraded. By switching he’s able to:

  • Immediately take advantage of RSS feeds, newsletters, and the mobile app.
  • A whole ass ecosystem of plugins to make your blog do everything except tuck him in at night.
  • Implement the ActivityPub plugin and publish content into the fediverse
  • Grab the Indieweb plugins and use Webmentions and syndicate comments and content with other blogs
  • Use the above with Bridgy and crosspost, backfeed and more with more SNSs
  • Use IFTTT, Zapier and more to automate external things like kicking off a job to auto post his video content on his new blog when he comes out with a new video on YouTube.

I’m happy he decided to go this route and I hope others out there do the same. If your message and voice are your livelihood, there’s no excuse for not using all the products available to make sure it stays that way.

 

When Mastodon Met Threads 🐘➕🧵🟰❓

It has started:

screenshot of a posting on Threads where Mark Zuckerberg announced social network Threads will be starting its activity pub interoperability testing now.
Mark Zuckerberg announced social network Threads will be starting its activity pub interoperability testing now. 🔗

I have been saying for a very long while now that ActivityPub as a protocol and within it Mastodon as the flagship app need to separate themselves from the fringe in order to gain more traction and usage.

Understand that ActivityPub itself is a protocol not unlike IMAP and HTTP under the W3C. Just like email doesn’t rely on any one server to transport mail traffic across the Internet, By using ActivityPub social media can enjoy the same freedom and transparency. I shouldn’t have to join every single social media and existence to get a complete picture of what everyone is up to… we actually had this about 20 something years ago when the then biggest part of the fledgling social media universe decided to use XMPP as a standard to federate their instant messenger networks. What that meant was my ICQ handle was able to contact all my friends on AOL instant messenger and MSN without having to do anything strange. Ironically it was Facebook that broke this paradigm when they took Facebook messenger behind closed doors in order to add all the functionality that it has now.

shallow focus photography of man wearing red polo shirt

OK, but you know Meta ain't doin' this outta the kindness of their hearts, right? 😒

It should not be forgotten that the reason why this is probably happening is because of the very strict policies that the European Union has imposed on how companies operate on the open Internet. It’s far easier for Mattar, the company that owns Facebook to create this new net work and design it from the start with open standards and then slowly bring everything over to it, rather than having to bolt on the same functionality to Facebook or Instagram as it stands now. While it may be seen as a self-serving move on their behalf, I personally welcome it because it means suddenly it might be one less thing to have to join and maintain in order to still be a part of the social media landscape.

Imagine a world where people on TikTok can communicate with people on YouTube and people on twitch. It might sound kind of strange at first but the same is already happening here in the #fediverse with Mastodon , PeerTube, and WordPress.

(Obligatory "how it works" link here.)

This integration is happening methodically and with a lot of advice from all stakeholders it appears; Threads users are going to get a window into the fediverse soon; as I type this, some accounts are getting read-only access. Evan Prodromou, one of the founding architects of the very underpinnings of ActivityPub  (@evan@cosocial.ca and @evanprodromou@threads.net) has been able to talk to the team over at Meta in charge of this undertaking along with a host of others in the #indieweb realm. Believe me when I say, these discussions got into the weeds and no stone was left untouched according to most of the attendees. This is the part that makes me feel Meta is acting in good faith.

woman wearing teal dress sitting on chair talking to man

Will everyone be OK with federation though?

It’s very easy to say “I’m not going to federate with Threads” or “I don’t want to associate with those Mastodon loons” (posts I won’t link to here, but use the appropriate search technique and you will find them in short order). The point is being missed insofar as the networks being interoperable if nothing else for the sake of creating a new standard and influencing the wider internet to “de-silo” all this content is a good thing and needs to be encouraged, not shunned.

As of this writing, there are no official timelines on when any of this will go into effect for us, but I have my educated guesses that it will coincide with the opening of Threads.net to EU signups and the move to be a federated network should keep regulators over there from breaking out the ban hammer. That’s supposed to be in a few days so we’ll see.

Stay tuned!

Vivaldi's Mastodon instance appears to be down and I have some advice for SNS users

Yikes 😬
My second-most used Mastodon instance is @starrwulfe@vivaldi.net… I hope its scheduled downtime and not a DDOS or worse.
The good thing about federation is they're not the only game in town. My main instance is @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.xyz (which is actually a Wordpress powered blog as well). I practice POSSE so the majority of my nonsense emanates from here and radiates out into the interwebs via syndication thanks to Bridgy and Micro.Blog.

 

[caption id="attachment_107849" align="alignnone" width="600"]cloudflare bad gateway error screenshot showing social.vivaldi.net's current offline status Well that ain't good...[/caption]

 

I’ll be going into detail on how I’m doing this and maybe the reasons behind the philosophy of why it’s important to cultivate a “digital garden” and maintain your own “outpost on the internet” over the next few weeks, but hopefully you can clearly see the “why you should have your own independent services” part of the conversation expressed in the screenshot above. If you’re as old as me, you’ll remember the fledgling days of 2009~2015 or so when the failwhale would show on the Old Bird, and we’d be incommunicado for some minutes/hours/even-days-that-one-time and the innanet would have to resort to… I dunno, email or Google+/Wave or whatever. 🤣

This is one problem #fediverse is trying to solve. If your email server went down, you’d just send that important email from your backup email account (I know you have at least one backup email account you’re not actively using, right? 😏) Why should social media be any different; we’re using SNS (Social Network Services) just like email these days, so we should be treating how we use it in the same manner.

Doin' too much": 💥😖 Time for a micro/macro blog rethink?

At some point yesterday, my Wordpress instance (thus the place where the thing you’re reading right now came from) ran out of memory.

🤔 I suspect it’s because I’m asking it to do too much:

And all on a tiny underpowered VPS instance.

Now if I could have things my way, I’d really prefer a clean install of GoBlog like I had before but with an easier way to post photos, follow people thru RSS/#Fediverse, and connect to different networks in the same manner. Something like a Wordpress|Tumblr|Friendica mashup (basically smoosh Firefish and Hubzilla together…) I decided to go back to using Wordpress instead becaus

  1. My skillset for Go vs PHP is smaller. Go as a language is easier though so it's only a matter of time...

  2. Since the above is true, I'm not sure how to keep it locked down and optimized; I've been dealing with Wordpress for like 20 years already so I understand this beast.

  3. I only have time for one impossible project at a time:

A line art picture of someone doing too many tasks. The boy has 6 arms flailing about juggling balls, papers and books. There are bystanders asking him to do these things.
My Wordpress instance trying to handle all I throw at it.
To remedy the memory issues, I could stary by using a minimal template¹ and throw some CSS at it to make it look like a TUI app in a terminal. Kinda like Jamie Tanna's site. Of course Andrés Cárdenas site is also something to aspire to as well as Tim Bachmann's. (Speaking of, did he ever get that one commenting plugin project off the ground?)

Next, I’ll make sure the thing is optimized. This also means not only the instance but the underlying supporting software too. I’m pretty good at that part though since my day job also demands it. I’m running this thing on Caddy (told you I was gonna force some Golang into my life!) and a very lean MariaDB container. Don’t be surprised if I wind up making a Nix declaration for this set up and make it so I only need to back up one thing everyday to get back up and running instead of the three I need to do now.

I’ll continue to optimize things around here and make it work the way I want it. I’ll make sure to get a colophon page going really soon so I can let y’all know how I did it; I still think this is the best way to enjoy the best of all worlds in the #fediverse and within the world of #indieweb enabled blogospheres.

If anyone has experience with any of the above, reach out to me via this post or just in general at @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.net, @starrwulfe@micro.blog or @starrwulfe@vivaldi.net

¹: Kinda started this just now with this new template file that I’m slowly adding custom CSS to… 

Federating the fediverse: BlueSky alpha version

ICYMI:

There’s a way for you to crosspost to BlueSky from your own #indieweb enabled website thanks to Joel’s (@joel@otter.garden) additions to Bridgy (created by Ryan (@snarfed.org@snarfed.org).

Also, I’m actually doing it right now and have been for about a week or so. So you’ll notice likes/reposts and comments coming from over there on my site and can interact from there, as I craft my one-man SNS outpost on the innanetz.

Joel Auterson @joelotter.com Just recently finished adding Bluesky backfeeding support to @snarfed.org's Bridgy :)
Details on how to do it here: Bridgy Bluesky setup