Hello blog readers and Fedi Friends!
Two months ago I managed to successfully federate this site, giving it #ActivityPub superpowers (if you are confused about what this means, I wrote about it for on my Ghost blog The Future is Federated).
This feat was the absolute highlight of my summer and I’d love to make it a habit to write more on here – inspired by Andy Piper‘s #100DaysToOffload (I couldn’t possibly write daily, but maybe weekly).
In case you missed it, on Friday I published this essay for The Future is Federated: “Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1)” (source). It’s my love letter to the Fediverse, listing all the reasons why I truly cherish it.
What does this have to do with “carpe diem” (seizing the day)?
Well, earlier this month I learned an important lesson: if I ever have a project idea – especially about a domain name to register – I should not procrastinate but immediately take action.
In late August I started looking up available URLs for potential future Fediverse projects / self-hosted one-person instances. I thought: for my birthday, I will gift myself two domain names – elena.video and elena.social. They were both available and seemed perfect for the purposes of hosting my own Peertube server… and/or something else.
Well well well my birthday came and went and on September 18th I checked and saw that elena.video had been registered by someone in Russia on September 12th 2024!!!
At least I bought/registered elena.social.
Maybe one day in the not so distant future I will learn how to self-host a Fediverse project and use that as its URL / username. For now, elena.social is redirecting to the “Links” page of this site, listing my social media profiles. I just updated that page to reflect my views and some of the powerful points I shared in my Ghost blog post: “My favorite social networks are all part of the real Fediverse (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed); I rarely use platforms owned by Meta & co. for reasons I outlined in this blog post (TL;DR: behavior modification and illusion of connection for purposes of surveillance capitalism).”
I’m excited but still, I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am (to this day!) for not registering elena.video when I saw it was available.
Well, you live and you learn. Carpe diem folks!
Cover photo by Anton Filatov on Unsplash
@ele this is great, captures perfectly why I hate threads so much, and love it here.
@_elena @ele @evan @cwebber ??
@ele Excellent, you love to see it.
What Activity-Object-Type is this?
I’m using the ActivityPub and Webfinger plugins for WordPress. I’m not a developer so that’s as far as I can explain it. Maybe @pfefferle could help say more?
@shadow the type that @ele is using is `Note`. you can check that by adding `?activitypub` at the end of each post, like for example `https://elenarossini.com/2024/09/carpe-diem/?activitypub`
Thank you for the explanation @pfefferle!
@pfefferle @ele
Don't think I've seen a long WordPress post before and the format displays nicely on Mastodon. That's why I asked. Thank you both. ?
Thank you Franz!
Indeed my original idea was to use elena.video to host my own PeerTube instance… and then elena.social maybe for MissKey or a microblogging fediverse platform. Oh well.
BTW I have heard great things about https://masto.host (for having your own Mastodon instance, but with tech help and regular updates)
Emoji test: ??