Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Tags: Fediverse


What should I do with my new domain?

Published on in 💭 Thoughts

I recently complained about domain registrars. But I also recently registered a new domain: j7s.me. A numeronym of my first name. And the .me TLD to show that I am a person. (And it is a short domain that was available.)

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Published on in 💬 Micro

While reddit is trying to kill itself – the CEO doesn’t seem to care much about the community (but I don’t really care about the topic enough to know for sure) – I think Lemmy is a nice alternative. Quite minimalist, but fast, has an app that isn’t cluttered with ads, and relies on ActivityPub to federate with the Fediverse. Even though reddit could reverse decisions, some people (including me) now know of better alternatives.

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Published on in 🔗 Links

I posted about GoToSocial, but another Mastodon-alternative and Fediverse software, Takahē, seems to make fast progress and has some unique features like support for multiple domains or multiple identities per user. I haven’t tried running it yet, but it looks promising!

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Published on in 💬 Micro

GoToSocial seems like a promising alternative to Mastodon. It’s written in Go (👍 in my opinion), lightweight and pretty good documented so far. It’s still “alpha software” but seems to make great progress. In the past, I self hosted a microblog.pub instance and then after some time without any Fediverse profile other than my blog, which has ActivityPub support as well, signed up at Fosstodon to be able to reply to blog comments from the Fediverse. I already set up an instace of GTS, but will probably wait to use it as my primary Fediverse profile until GTS enters the beta stage sometime in 2023 according to the roadmap.

Yesterday, I fixed GoBlog to be able to be followed by GoToSocial users. I didn’t know that some ActivityPub servers require requests to get information about the remote actor to be signed. But that should work now. 😄

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Published on in 💬 Micro

Just a small note: I deleted my Microblog.pub instance. I liked this piece of software and it’s a nice single-user alternative to Mastodon, but I don’t need a Fediverse instance anymore. My new fediverse strategy is to use my normal blog to post stuff (you can follow me via @en@jlelse.blog and @de@jlelse.blog) and Miniflux to follow people (Mastodon offers RSS user feeds).

If you reply to posts or mention my user handle in a public post on Mastodon, I will receive a notification and your reply will appear in the “Interaction” section under the post. If you interact with a post on your website and don’t automatically send Webmentions, you can also submit the URL in the form below each post.

By removing Microblog.pub from my server it also reduces the need for resources a lot. Python as well as MongoDB don’t seem to be that resource friendly. I currently use the cheapest VPS option from Hetzner and for the few remaining things hosted there (my website, my blog and some Go tools etc.), it’s more than enough.

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It feels great without Twitter

Published on in 💭 Thoughts

I left Twitter one month ago and didn’t miss it a single time. Reading stories about “Brand Blockers” (Medium paywall) just gives me the feeling that this was the right decision.

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I deleted my Twitter account

Published on in ✍️ Posts
Updated on

I finally did what I thought about a few months ago: I finally deleted my Twitter account (or rather deactivated it, it will be deleted if I do not log in for another 30 days).

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More thoughts about ActivityPub support for this Hugo blog

Published on in 💬 Micro

I plan to add a bit of ActivityPub to my blog to be able to interact with the fediverse, without the need to use Mastodon, Pleroma or my current microblog. Just my static Hugo blog with it’s dynamic Go-backend. Because I don’t want to implement everything from scratch - I haven’t yet added media support for MicroPub - I am in search for libraries that help implementing ActivityPub, or at least give me a starting point. I discovered the library activityserver, which is used by a tool called pherephone by write.as, maybe that can help me.

What I still have to think about though, is how I’m going to connect it with the rest of the system. And what’s also still missing: The media endpoint and update support for MicroPub (I should do this first).

Or should I just cancel my plans with ActivityPub and wait until Fediverse software supports IndieWeb technologies? :thinking_face:

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Delete Twitter?

Published on in 💭 Thoughts

Some time ago I decided to unfollow everyone on Twitter and put all accounts I previously followed into a list. This gave me the advantage to read tweets in a chronological order and not rely on what Twitter thinks is interesting to me or see “recommended” tweets.

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Trying microblog.pub

Published on in 💭 Thoughts

I started my fediverse journey with Mastodon, the most popular fediverse / ActivityPub software out there. First I joined a public instance, then I temporarily hosted my own instance, forgot about the fediverse, joined again on a public instance some months later and eventually settled with my own Pleroma instance, which is now running for almost a year.

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Jan-Lukas Else