My Mastodon account for this blog changed, and my thoughts about the decentralized Web

Previously to follow the blog on the fediverse you’d have to follow @alexesc@write.as, but this added an extra step for publishing, so I’ll make some some changes to simplify my workflow wile remaining end user functionality.

Thanks to Darius Kazemi’s RSS to AtivityPub converter I was able to publish this blog feed straight to the fediverse. Click on subscribe at the top of the page and select via Mastodon.

Previously on my publishing to Mastodon journey…

Initially I came across write.as, a minimlasit blogging platform, and it caught my eye back in November 2018 when GitHub username PrestonN, who develops and maintains freetube, used it as a method for publishing patch notes.

I began uploading my work to my website on January 2018, back then you’d only knew about my works if I specifically told you I have a website; meaning I did no real publishing at all. By late March I embraced a more privacy oriented lifestyle. By then I have discovered ways to circumvent giving data to YouTube when watching content on the site, I achieved this by using a now discontinued site hooktube, since the site stopped protecting user’s privacy on July 16th (source) I moved to exclusively watching videos with Newpipe on mobile and VLC + YT-DL on desktop, this was a pain on desktop. Thankfully a month later I discovered FreeTube, which by necessity migrated off hooktube, by the next few updates they moved their patch notes to write.as, thus introducing me to it. I made an account and all but I end up putting off writing on it. At the time I didn’t think about my writings as blog posts, but as documents and articles, thus virtually inflating the effort that went into them & their frequency - I would never dare to blog if each post takes me close to a month to write.

Forward to new year’s day 2019 & I finally decided to post frequently; small & quick posts, write small & quick posts I told myself firmly, my first post took a weak to publish regardless. But still this wasn’t publishing because my site was not public. It wasn’t public not in the sense that it was private or unavailable, but in the sense that it didn’t have a public, an audience. To be recognized or famous was never the goal in mind, but rather to be “out there“. I have always obsessed over internet click-holes, prepubescent me would find a blog or a fan wiki with a link to a really interesting project, then the project page would link to the author, then the author’s site would host his life’s work, each page filled with citations & callbacks to their inspirations and heroes - this is the sort of creator-audience relationship I strive for with my online presence.

But today’s social media cannon is perfect for discovering small, obscure and niche creators. On the old Net your favorite internet citizen would have some of his work on one site, his oldest stuff on a dead link, his still forming ideas on his old high school profile and his reading list on some other dead forum. This web of information about old fashioned people is what’s the world wide web’s all about, but back then the links were up, today the chains are broken and the magic was lost. Modern decentralized social media emulates this early Internet pre-search engines days, Mastodon being the leader amongst the new cool kid’s Web. The combination of old n’ rusty modem ancient web-like Internet and today’s centralization and ease of use of modern social media makes up a perfect storm, this new wave style web has the potential to connect more small communities, bring to light old profiles and upgrade them to classics and to re-invent the Net and our lives as a whole.

I want to be part of this new web, I want to give others the feeling of getting trapped on a click-hole vortex on a user friendly way, but I also want to benefit from the ease of use myself. This utopic slice of the Net is new to me & I’m learning along as I go, so when I found out write.as can push your posts to the fediverse I jumped in without second thought. Now after actually suing the platform I see lots of bumps on the road ahead, firstly the posts must be re-written without front matter, then copy pasted into the site (that’s right I can’t publish from this very blog, I have to manually copy paste the content on my write.as account) and finally there’s the spam detector bot.

Upon re-publishing all my past blogs, with the goal of mirroring my GitHub Pages blog on write.as, my account got flagged as spam. This is where I should have given up on write.as, but there I was desperate for a Mastodon account for the blog, I emailed back and forth with the write.as team and got my account re-activated. But now envision a future were every time I want to write something down I must make two separate versions, one with front matter and one without, then use two septate software to push the blog up on two septate platforms, and add to that the possibility of being flagged as spam again and also, what if I want to update an old post? I would need to update on my blog, on write.as and delete the old toots on mastodon to get rid of the dead links - yikes, what a nightmare!

Again, I’m learning as I go along. For some time now I’ve been a fan of Darius Kazemi’s work, he’s websites are responsible for my latest I got sucked into a hyper-link wormhole-itus. And just by pure chance he made an RSS to Mastodon converter, so from this point onwards people on Mastodon can follow me via Kazemi’s RSS bot.

After a quick test, it seems to be working!