This first post in a series about the Fediverse focuses on three aspects as they relate to the future of TechDistortion (this blog): Full-Length Blog Link MicroBlogging, WebMentions and Federation support (ActivityPub/LitePub/OStatus).

Twinkblog

Links to full-length Blogs posted as Microblog entries don’t intend to convey much other than a title and some brief text, drawing potential readers to the full article. I mentioned the phenomenon of Twinkblogs 5 years ago, but really it’s an avenue of communicating an article exists, not the content of the article itself. In that regard it’s the size of the audience you can reach through that channel that matters the most.

WebMention

IndieWeb are popularising the WebMention as a method of allowing users to reply to a blog or article with the article then able to aggregate all comments, mentions, reblogs as part of the article. Any WebMention compliant site would allow that interaction to occur creating a common point for all comments in a federated way between users from different accounts on different systems, like Disqus but not centralised and more flexible. If you’re interested in comments on your blog then that’s something worth exploring. I’ve never had comments enabled on TechDistortion in the decade I’ve been writing articles and don’t intend to add them now. Any feedback from readers is welcomed to either myself via the feedback form or via the Fediverse directly to me personally.

Federation

Not all platforms are so text-length restrictive as Twitter (280 characters) and Mastodon (500 characters) with Pleroma allowing administrators to set whatever limit they like. On my Pleroma instance I’ve left it at the default 5,000 characters but might change that at some point in the future. The idea is that using ActivityPub/LitePub a blog could be subscribed to as if it was a regular account on the Fediverse. That seems convenient however scrolling through a 9,000 character long article on a smartphone screen application intended for short posts might not be as clean an experience as a dedicated long-article reading application like Unread (for example). That said, the simplicity of being able to consolidate into a single window is quite appealing. Unfortunately when moving away from Statamic to Hugo, Federation wasn’t a thought I had in mind, and hence since neither supports Federation it will not be explored in the short term.

Future Plans

Currently when a blog entry goes up on TechDistortion, an RSS Feed scraper takes a copy of the title, a URL link to the article, then publishes it to a Mastodon account. From there a second script takes that and re-tweets it to the TechDistortion Twitter account. Currently counting the number of actual people and lists on the TechDistortion Twitter account, there are more real people subscribed to the sites RSS Feed directly and also to both my personal Mastodon and old Twitter accounts.

Based on the above Twinkblog rationale and also with my move to gradually step away from Twitter, I’ve decided to close the TechDistortion Twitter account. I will instead be posting those links only to my personal Fediverse account, which is copied to my ‘old’ personal Twitter account. RSS will always remain for anyone to subscribe to. My recommendation is that people following the blog on Twitter either follow my ‘old’ Twitter account @johnchidgey or better still, jump on the Fediverse somewhere and following me @[email protected] where I’m active every day.

In future if a Hugo–>Federation intermediary service is developed I’ll probably look into that, since I really like Hugo ;)

Thanks everyone.

Oh yeah…Happy New Year.