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Creating a couple of videos highlighting Taylor’s 1-click Mastodon installer for Reclaim Cloud has been on my to-do for too long, so this week I knocked it out. I did two quick videos, the first takes you through the basic install. While the installer is a Docker container and most of the heavy lifting is done for you, there are still some manual pieces like pointing a domain, creating an admin account, and restarting the container. Taylor’s guide goes through these points in detail, so this is really just a video supplement to the docs.
The follow-up video is focused on where and how to update the environment variables in the .env file. You use the .env file to add details for transactional email like Mailgun, as well as to point the media storage to a third-party S3-compatible service like Digital Ocean’s Spaces. Once again, this video serves to reinforce the guide we already have for doing this, so if the video fails you can fallback on the guide.
The final piece would be to highlight the simple set of commands to upgrade to a newer Mastodon version. I am working with Taylor to make sure that is working as expected, once that happens I’ll be sure to finish off this trilogy of Mastodon 1-click awesome.
I was trolling the olde blog settings for the WordPress Jetpack plugin and spotted something that confirmed I had aleady learned– the nuking of Twitter’s API meant the Social module could no longer tweet new posts.
Old news.
But what I did see was a new option to connect my WordPress blog to publish new posts to Mastodon. In like 10 second I connected to my instance and connected my account to this here blog.
Thus, this post is mostly a test of the connection (for which I spent more than too much time in Photoshop on the fetured image).
This might end up double tooting, since I have been using an IFTTT applet to share to mastodon whenever there is a new post in my RSS feed.
Ok, let’s see how this elephant flies with a new Jetpack!
Dead bird dead bird.
I’m no super billionaire businessman, but to cut off the world’s largest web publishing platform from adding content to your product is— dumb ass to the nth degree.
Toot, toot, someone sweep the dead bird off the road.
I have two mastodon post tooters in operation now… for comparison:
The difference is minor- the Jetpack on includes an excerpt of the post. I like in IFTTT I can customize it with extra text like before the title “Just CogDogBlogged” and adding an extra hashtag. I could include the excerpt in IFTTT but am not sure it matters. Also, IFTTT is a bit delayed, the JetPack one is instant. As if I am that important that I don’t want to keep my fan waiting.
I don’t think it means a hill of beans to anyone except me. I like IFTTT more, but I can use JetPack if the former ever poops out.
Featured Image: My own photoppery (OMG the crap DALL-E gave me for “An elephant wearing a jetpack hovers in the air over a dead bird laying on the road, cartoon style”) based on p1210759 flickr photo by generalising shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license and Dead bird flickr photo by indoloony shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
Yesterday Maren Deepwell, Kerry Pinny, Taylor Jadin and I ran the first of three sessions introducing Mission Mastodon. “What is that?” you wisely ask. Well, it’s a collaboration between ALT and Reclaim Edtech to provide a temporary server for folks interested in exploring the federated social networking platform Mastodon. It’s a sandbox space to experiment with signing-up, finding people you follow elsewhere, wrapping your head around content search, as well as re-programming ourselves to think beyond the large, monolithic sites that have come to dominate online social spaces.
Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse
Jon Udell’s recent post “Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse” discusses how a federated tool like Mastodon subverts the underlying attention economy driving the influencer culture most of the corporate social media giants have embraced. What if some of us aspire to something other than broadcast celebrity, what if we actually want to be social in the most generative sense of that word. To quote Udell:
I just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight me, and who might feel similarly about my words and pictures and ideas.
Hope springs eternal in this digital optimist, and those netizens like Udell who have worked hard for several decades to underline the myriad issues with networked culture while remaining focused on trying to build and promote a better, healthier web are my heroes. And I can even follow and talk to them on these miraculous networks. To misquote the Bard: “Sign me up for this brave new web, that has such people in it!”
But I digress, I just wanted to link to our first session, and thanks those who showed up in the chat and made it that much better. It was a lot of fun to talk about how Mastodon feels different (in many of the ways quoted above), but also to chat and share useful tips and tricks that might come in useful as you’re getting started.
You can watch the video here, as well as the future episodes in February and March. Also, be sure to check out the chat happening on Reclaim’s Discord, which you can access from the linked watch. I highly recommend the conversation given there some great resources shared by folks, including this list of annotated Mastodon resources Chris Aldrich has been collecting. Finally, if nothing else, watch the video above for Kerry Pinny’s 55 second intro that is absolutely brilliant! I love that my nickname is now “the Joker!”
Anyway, if you are at all intrigued by any of this, join us in this expendable Mastodon server that will explode in 90 89 days….
The brave new world post-Twitter, or post-the Old Twitter, or has anything really changed? Chefs ponder the new social media.
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