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.
@ele carissima, volevo farti sapere che Google evidentemente mi odia, e non gli piacciono le mie risposte al captcha: dopo dieci schermate a indicargli scale e biciclette mi sono stufato e ho desistito.
@_elena @ele @evan @cwebber ??
@ele Excellent, you love to see it.
What Activity-Object-Type is this?
@ele
Cool Blog! Just added it to my RSS reader.
I'm sorry to hear someone was faster in registering the domain ?
Recently I also wondered how I'd do self hosting. I mean from a technical point of view, wouldn't for example own mastodon and peertube instances require different hostnames?
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)
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. ?
Emoji test: ??