Searching for a new social home

This is a continuation of various posts I’ve made recently, but I thought it would be better to pull the threads together in one place, and somewhere that’s about my personal ‘journey’ rather than as what might look to be weather related posts elsewhere on the forum.

I’ll start by saying that I know that ‘social networking/media’ is a personal thing. I know some people dislike it and don’t have accounts, or merely use it to keep in contact with a small number of family and friends. I’m not trying to force you to like it, so this thread isn’t for you so you can stop reading here! This thread is for those who do use it and are looking for alternatives.

Like many people, I’m trying to limit my use of and exposure to ‘social’ sites owned by the oligarchs/billionaires. They’re becoming increasingly toxic and full of propaganda. They did what various people told us they’d do - suck us into their platform with promises of free treats and then when we’re hooked they start to use the platform to spread their own messages. Enough of that, if you know what I’m talking about then you know what I mean.

I’ve been looking for alternatives to the various platforms and here’s where I’ve reached. Some of the links will take you to my account on the platform so you at least have a starting point. If you’re a user of the platform feel free to follow me.

Micro-blogging

Bluesky is a good modern micro-blogging platform. It’s got many of the features you’d want and is growing fast - currently at 28 million users. Compared to other older micro-blogging platforms it’s actually got a lot of people who are friendly and willing to engage in decent ‘post style’ conversations. It’s got an API and a number of weather users are already publishing weather posts using it, e.g. Bluesky weather report and Bluesky WxSim forecast.

Bluesky also offers the option to create your own Personal Data Server (PDS) so that you own your own content. I’ve created my own PDS but at the moment it’s purely for my own test accounts. It’s not currently possible to migrate accounts off one PDS to another one, so I don’t really want to put my main account onto my own PDS just yet. A PDS isn’t difficult to create, but you can easily use Bluesky using the ‘official’ servers.

Mastodon I’ve had a Mastodon account for a while, but I don’t really use it very much. When I first signed up there weren’t many users and therefore little content. I then started to use Bluesky and got hooked there. However, I’m keeping a watching eye on Mastodon.

Social Media/Networking/Blogging/CMS

Joomla I’ve had a variety of WordPress sites over the years for personal blogging, family connections and even for Weather-Watch. Unfortunately the Wordpress ‘top man’ seems to want to implode the platform so I’ve been looking for alternatives. My current favourite is Joomla, which I’ve also used a couple of times over the years. Joomla is powerful but that also makes it fairly complex to set up and use. I can’t give an example link right now because I’m currently migrating one of my WordPress sites into Joomla and it’s not quite ready to go live.

Trust Cafe was my first attempt to find a Facebook alternative. It’s got potential although having used it for a while I find the way it works a little confusing, e.g. there are multiple ways to see slightly different sets of posts. There are people posting content, but it’s generally quite low bandwidth so (I think) needs a spark to get it growing.

Diaspora* has been around for over 10 years but growth doesn’t seem to have taken off in a big way yet. I started to look at it because I was finding Trust Cafe a little confusing. The Diaspora* way of working is far more familiar and so simpler to use. The platform also allows you to create your own pod, i.e. you have your own Diaspora* server. Unlike Bluesky there is a method available to migrate accounts to a different pod. If you’d like to try Diaspora* then you’re welcome to create an account on my pod - Pod Invitation.

Miscellanous

This is a placeholder to record other potentially useful platforms. For example, I’ve just discovered Friendica which (apparently) takes advantage of the federation offered by Mastodon and Diaspora* so that you can post once in Friendica and it cross posts to the other platforms. I’m not sure how it copes with differences, e.g. Diaspora* allows long posts (100kb I think) and Mastodon is limited to a micro-blogging text of just 500 bytes. Something new to explore though.

Summary

I might be spreading myself thinly across multiple platforms, but unless/until there are clear front-runner alternatives I think that’s the only way. It’s also possible that over time federation might help to interlink platforms in a way that allow you to use one but get the benefits of multiple platforms, but federation is only just starting to work so it’s not a guaranteed solution yet.

If you’re experimenting with these, or other, platforms please comment below to let us know how you’re getting on.

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I’m starting to find concepts that I’ve heard about but not explored yet, so I’m adding to my knowledge quickly. Today’s new words are Fediverse and ActivityPub.

These are sort of the same thing. The Fediverse is a set of connected platforms, where the connection varies in capability from platform to platform. ActivityPub is a means of posting content in one platform and making it available to others within the Fediverse.

To give an example of this (based on my current understanding!)…

Mastodon, Diaspora* and Friendica are part of the Fediverse. So sitting in Friendica I followed my Mastodon and Diaspora* accounts. Theoretically if I post in Diaspora* my Friendica account will see the post. Obviously posting to yourself isn’t very useful, but it does mean that if I’m only a user of (for example) Friendica and I have friends who only have a Mastodon or Diaspora* account then I can follow them and we can see each other’s posts on each platform.

There are some limitations, which might be removed in future. For example, you can:

  • Follow Mastodon and Diaspora* accounts from Friendica
  • Follow Friendica and Diaspora* accounts from Mastodon
  • Follow a Friendica or Mastodon user from Diaspora* if they follow you first, but you can’t initiate a follow from Diaspora* (yet)

Other useful things to know:

  • Trust Cafe doesn’t have a Fediverse/ActivityPub connection. They would like to add one, but need someone (some people) to help to code it.
  • Interestingly Discourse (this forum) has an ActivityPub plugin. I will need to do some experiments!

A quick update as I’ve been making some progress.

I dabbled with Friendica which seemed fairly good and allowed some access to other federated services. This would allow you to follow users from multiple services from Friendica, giving the potential for using a single service to follow people who were users of different services.

Unfortunately the Friendica system I signed up to didn’t allow access to Disapora so I set about trying to create my own Friendica hub. I had horrible problems with this, but I’m almost certain that was down to the server I was trying to install onto. It was pretty cut down and I suspect some things were configured in a way that didn’t suit the Friendica software.

Whilst looking at Friendica I discovered another piece of similar software - Hubzilla. The main developer of Hubzilla used to be a Friendica developer but left to create his own application. Comments suggested that it had more features than Friendica so I set about trying to use it, but again came across a block that the public Hubzilla server I was using didn’t have all the connection possibilities I wanted to experiment with enabled. So once again I set about trying to install my own Hubzilla hub. I had problems doing this too, but persevered and 24 hours later I have a working hub! I suspect that if I went back to Friendica now I could probably get it working.

With my own hub I have enabled ActivityPub (for Mastodon) and Diaspora* protocols. That’s allowed me to connect to my Mastodon and Diaspora* accounts. I’ve not tried any posting yet to see how the systems interact. After the excitement of getting Hubzilla working I’m calling it a night!

Today’s news…

I’ve successfully installed the ActivityPub plugin for the forum. I can now make categories or tags appear as Fediverse actors (accounts). Once they’re defined as an actor it’s possible to follow that category/tag from ActivityPub apps in the Fediverse.

For example, and this isn’t set up yet so it won’t work if you try it, I could set up an actor connected to a ‘News’ tag. The actor would be called [email protected]. If you followed this actor in Mastodon then each time something is posted to the forum using the News tag it will be pushed out to all the followers of that actor in Mastodon (or other Fediverse connected followers). I’ve got some ideas on how I could use this, but only have one test actor set up so far.

Friendica - I’ve stopped experimenting with this. Whilst it looks like an interesting approach to following multiple different platforms from one application I just couldn’t get my own copy working. As it stands it would just act as another layer above other platforms which in many cases can already talk to each other, so it doesn’t add much. I’ll probably come back to look at it again in future though.

Hubzilla - I’ve had more success with this. It does much the same as Friendica but with some different connectivity. I’ve got my own copy working with connections to Mastodon and Disapora. Unfortunately it refuses to follow the test forum actor with the forum just giving a 400 (Bad Request) error when I try to follow the actor. Mastodon happily follows the Discourse actor so the Discourse end does seem to be at least partly functional. There are other oddiities with it, e.g. some accounts I’ve followed have avatar icons and some just have a broken avatar. I’ll keep using Hubzilla for a little while to see how it goes.

Diaspora* - I like the simple user interface which is easy understand and use. The downsides are that Diaspora* uses its own protocol and can’t connect to ActivityPub or Bluesky. Some apps, e.g. Hubzilla have created plugins to connect to Diaspora* but that’s part of the problem - if you use an app that connects but then want/need to change app there’s no guarantee that the new app will connect. So I’ll retain my Diaspora* pod for a while just to monitor how it goes, but Diapsora* appears to be a slow-burn project so I suspect my interest may fizzle out at some point.

Trust Cafe - I quite like this but it it’s got two downsides. I find the user interface overly complicated. There are various different places to see different sub-sets of posts and I spend too long looking in the wrong places for posts. Secondly, whilst there are supposed to be about 500,000 users of the service many posts are from the same small sub-set of users. I have an account there and will keep watching it for a while but like Diaspora* I suspect my interest may wane at some point.

So for now I seem to be back to two choices or perhaps two joint solutions:

Bluesky - I’m already there. It’s got a fairly big userbase which is growing and the software is also growing with new features being added pretty quickly. I’m already using the API to auto-post and have a reasonble set of followers/followees. It’s a good app for microblogging, i.e. an X/Twitter replacement, so I’m definitely going to continue using it for the forseeable future.

Mastodon - Having now used it more than I had done previously I can see it’s got some good points. It does fill the same kind of spot as Bluesky, i.e. being an X/Twitter replacement, but it’s also got ActivityPub underpinning it. So whilst Bluesky is an island, albeit a pretty big island, Mastodon is a smaller island with bridges to other small islands.

I like the ability to turn forum posts into posts in the Fediverse. I’ve also just started to experiment with a bi-directional bridge between Mastodon and Bluesky. This is only beta and run by an individual though. It would be better to be a properly defined protocol that was implemented within Mastodon/ActivityPub and Bluesky software, but maybe that will come soon?

I find the Mastodon user interface tricky to use, but that might just be lack of use so far.

So for now I’ll continue to use Bluesky and start to use Mastodon. Neither are a replacment for Facebook yet for a couple of reasons. Neithe is a direct replacement for the most commonly used Facebook features. They’re also still way too niche - I’m not aware of any family or friends who use either and whilst I can find new friends to communicate with, that wasn’t the reason for wanting to leave Facebook!

Mastodon

It took a little brain power, but I got my own Mastodon server up and running. The key learning points are:

  1. Follow the original Mastodon installation instructions rather than some overly complex process documented by a third party to get a version of it running in Docker. Docker is probably the better way to do it, but if you produce instructions for something try to make sure that you include all the steps and don’t make assumptions that your readers will somehow know the stuff that you don’t include.
  2. I’d enabled the advanced web view in Mastodon because I’m advanced, aren’t I? That was a mistake because it makes it more complicated to navigate when you don’t know the application very well. The basic (?) view is far more Facebook-like and less cluttered. It’s good to have the choice though.
  3. If you’re setting your own server up choose usernames and email addresses carefully. I used the wrong combination so now I have to figure out whether I can create a new alias for my username whilst my username is still migrating from the original third-party Mastodon server.

If you’d like to try Mastodon out, ask me for an invite code to my server.

Other related news

I deleted my Diaspora* server. I hadn’t used it very much and didn’t have any followers. It was interesting to experiment with it, but unless it grows rapidly I don’t think I’ll use it. So I now have:

  • Bluesky - I have my own PDS and publish weather data to Bluesky.
  • Mastodon - I have my own server and I’m starting to look at how I will use it more.
  • Hubzilla - I have my own server and need to consider whether it’s a useful addition to the mix.
  • Trust Cafe - I still have my account there and will keep watching to see how it continues to develop

None of these solutions are exact Facebook replacements, but if I can attract family and friends onto them then I think they’d be good enough to keep in online contact.

My accounts

You can find me at:

Feel free to follow me if you’re a user of any of these. I’m also interesting in hearing your opinion of any of these services if you use them.

Well that was an “interesting” multi-hour trip down the rabbit hole!

The cloud server I installed Mastodon onto wasn’t sized for it. It was just a good place to put it. So having got it running I saw that I would run out of disk space much sooner than I’d expected. I started to look at how to add more storage…

  1. The cloud servers come with specific amounts of vCPUs, RAM and disk space. To go bigger means rescaling to a better specified server. The only way to get a lot more disk space was to get a lot more vCPUs and RAM that I didn’t need but added to the cost. A server with enough disk space would cost me about 6 times as much as the one I was using, so this solution was a non-starter.
  2. Add some S3 storage to the existing server. S3 storage is usually pretty fast, but it’s for storing objects. I didn’t want to store objects - I needed extra file storage. No problem, there’s a file system called ‘s3fs’ which allows you to create an S3 based file system. If you ever think of doing this, DON’T! It’s painfully slow. If I’d read more about it before doing it I’d have known. I started to move the files to the S3 storage but gave up after it took over 30 minutes to move about 60MB (there was 8GB to move).
  3. Another storage option is a storage box. This allows you to mount the storage as a CIFS/Samba storage device and I already had some of this kind of storage mounted on the server for backups. I created a new mount point for my data and copied it across - much quicker this time. I then added a symbolic link to point the location where the system wanted to see the data at the new storage and restarted Mastodon. Things sort of looked OK, but no new data was arriving. A look at the logs showed lots of file permission errors (actually a file ownership issue). I tried to change the ownership, but that’s not allowed on storage box files. They’re designed to hold backups which would be done by a system account with lots of permissions so there was no way to fix this problem.
  4. Then I remembered that cloud servers can have storage volumes attached. I’d never used these before, but wished I’d thought of them sooner. The process of adding one to a live server (with the correct naming and mount points) was tricky, involving playing with deleting/adding/formatting partitions on a live server. I managed to follow the instructions and soon had the data on a new volume partition. I could set the ownership and permissions as I wanted, which was lucky because they’d got messed up during steps 1, 2 and 3. After a bit more tweaking I got Mastodon up and running with 160GB of it’s own storage rather than about 35GB of storage shared with the databases that already lived on the server.

That’s enough tinkering and tweaking for today. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have available in the next couple of days - tomorrow is Chinese New Year’s Eve followed by Chinese New Years Day so celebrations planning is underway!