Federating content

After giving up on the ActivityPub plugin due to server issues, I’ve been feeling a bit isolated. I know a few people followed this blog through their fediverse profiles/readers. It even prompted some interesting discussions.

As I’m also on record as being a big believer in the fediverse as a foundational protocol for a more open web, it feels wrong to not do my part by federating the content I publish here on this blog. To wit, I’ve once more turned to the great work of Jan Boddez to get the setup for my personal website just right. 

This time, I’m using his plugin Share to Mastodon to federate the content of my personal website through my Mastodon profile. #IndieWeb people will, of course, recognise this as the POSSE approach — posting first to my own personal site, before synchronising the content to other platforms. 

I’ve tweaked the behaviour of the plugin slightly to get it just to my liking. My short form content, notes and links are shown as full content entries on my Mastodon profile. For posts, like the one you’re reading right now, the Mastodon profile will only show the excerpt and you’ll have to click through to my website to read the full content.

I could choose a fediverse instance — or set up my own — that supports longer form content. But, I feel like this is a good compromise for the inherent friction caused by intermingling both short and long form content into a single feed.

So, if you have a fediverse profile and prefer that plain, old RSS for following personal websites, feel free to follow @lars@mastodon.social to keep up with my posts, notes and links. The profile will not be active beyond syncing content from this website, and potentially interacting with responses.

Lastly, I’m thinking about using Brid.gy to pull in (“backfeed”) interactions with my Mastodon profile and display them here as well. But I want to give that some more thought before pulling the trigger.