Executive Summary: I’m changing the Social Media platforms I repost to in order to provide better service to the people who use them. If you access WIST via Mastodon or Diaspora*, this has an effect on your. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
The rest is technical insider baseball. Please feel free to skip.
In addition to this core WordPress site for WIST, I’ve been running a re-posting site on Mastodon since late 2022, set up during an early wave of Twitter exfiltration. It’s been fun and modestly successful (219 followers at the moment).
I’ve also been running a re-posting site for WIST on Diaspora*, ever since Google Plus went away. Not quite as many people there, but some nice engagement.
Well, the Diaspora* pod I’ve been on is retiring, which made me look for a replacement that would be accessible to both my Diaspora* crew and to the broader population of the Fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, such as what Mastodon uses. I have finally settled on Friendica, which lets me communicate to ActivityPub and Diaspora* both.
In fact, it’s a better tool for interacting with the ActivityPub Fediverse than Mastodon is, as it lets gives me (theoretically) unlimited space for posts (unlike the 500 characters on my Masto server) as well as rich text (bolding, italics, etc.) which can be published across ActivityPub, even show on systems that don’t allow it for native posts (like Mastodon).
So with this change, I’ll be retiring both my Mastodon and Diaspora* sites in sort order. If you want to keep track of WIST (both new quotes and updated ones) in the Fediverse, you can look for @wist@my-place.social from a Fediverse application, or click on the Fediverse icon on the right-hand sidebar.
(As an historic note, I have 44 contacts at my Diaspora* pod, and 221 followers on Mastodon; let’s see how many of them come over to the new setup.)
If you have any problems, please leave a comment on this post.
Sidebar: While I’m yammering about that, just an added note that I am aware of the performance problems here on the wist.info site (all to aware of them, and struggling with them most days myself). This has been a problem since I was migrated to a new hosting company. I continue to work on resolving the time-outs and HTTP 500 errors, but I don’t have, unfortunately, any short-term answers beyond “try again” if you run into those problems.