Although there are a couple more days in the month, today is a wrap for me on #Fedibruary .
To round out the month I installed #GoToSocial (#mastodon alternative #ActivityPub service) in a test environment and played around.

I'm pretty happy with it! the install was simple (barring a confusing error message or two), #pachli worked with it (once I changed from port 8080 to 443) and it has a nice little admin portal to manage the deployments website.

There are a bunch of settings related to #SMTP and #OIDC which make it attractive as a medium term deployment project when I want to run my own server for reals.

This weeks #Fedibruary topic was an #XMPP / #Jabber server and following a suggestion here on masto (thanks @erebion !) I installed Prosody .
In a move which probably made my life harder overall, I decided to install within our network and not on a public server. This is a problem because XMPP servers push mail to each other like SMTP... which I should have remembered before hand....

Anyway, I did successfully set up #Prosody and did some experiments, messaging to my #xmpp.social account and a second account I had created on the private server.

Because (i believe) of split dns issues i was having the users on my private server can't share media or files . I hope that would be a matter of correctly configuring dns and the issue might go away.

I'd have liked to have done a better job of this one but I think this is a valid proof of concept and I will be storing my notes ("documentation") away for a future live deployment.

Thanks to everyone who engaged with my last #Fedibruary post and suggested some applications I could try and solutions to various topics I raised.

I've decided this weeks #Fedibruary was a cautionary tale of failing to plan correctly, and will not be trying to squeeze deployment of something in during the last two days.
Instead, my take aways for this week were:
- I didn't realise what I wanted until I started testing things (and now realise I should have done the testing BEFORE this month)
- I have proactively signed up to several #federated services this week while testing including a #pixelfed instance (@[email protected]), a #jabber / #XMPP instance ([email protected]) and plan to sign up for one more (a #funkwhale somewhere).
- All the research I did feels to me like it should be counted as a positive result from this week, so it makes this list too!

Week three was slated to be an XMPP server so I will be trying to get back on track with that.

So I've discovered over the last few days that my #Fedibruary plan has a problem: In many ways I don't actually know what I want to end up with.
The #chat element was easy: I wanted to spent more hours boring lots of people so #mastodon was the obvious choice.

My plan for week two was #Pixelfed or #Peertube but after spending the last couple of days looking at them I'm no longer sure they're what I want.
Why? Because I've realised what I really want is something more like a private media library/player where I can sometimes link the content to other people. Pixelfed is definitely a platform focused on posting, not being a media library.
I've also considered #MediaGoblin as a result of that discovery but it doesn't feel complete enough (sorry guys), from looking at their site and the known public instances.
I've been considering making week two my week to migrate away from #Google photos by setting up #Piwigo . This also doesn't appeal to me as a #Fedibruary activity since piwigo doesn't have #activitypub support.

What to do? I'm unsure. I may install Pixelfed or peertube just to experience the process, I may bring #funkwhale forward in my plans and do it this week, I might try an #XMPP / #Jabber server install but I just don't know 🤯

What I do know is that I've spent two of my five days trying to decide what to do.

A bit over a week ago I announced I was going to be doing a #Fedibruary , starting with pruning my #LinkedIn network.

One week in, how did I do?
I'm actually pretty happy with this result - I've moved 37 contacts from LinkedIn to #Mastodon and I'm down to 188 left in LI.

Even better, *I'm actually still on track to be fedi positive each week*!

During the next 7 days I hope to set up #Pixelfed and give that a spin. I will probably sign in to a public version somewhere first (maybe https://pixelfed.au/ ? @shlee and @xrobau seem to know what they're doing :D)

In a couple of days January will end and that means we're about to be in... #Fedibruary !

This year I'll be testing out a different #fedi project, or taking extra steps to #decentralise, each week.

At this stage my Fedibruary plan is:

Week one:
- Announce my migration intent to #LinkedIn
- Where I have a contact on LinkedIn and #Mastodon I will remove the connection on LinkedIn

Week two:
- Spin up a #Pixelfed instance to play with

Week three:
- Sign up for, or deploy, an #XMPP / #Jabber service (many many years since I had working XMPP!)

Week four:
- Undecided but I'm mainly considering #Peertube or #MediaGoblin (it'll depend on how week two goes)
- If Pixelfed goes really well and I don't feel like a video focused platform would be useful to me I'll dip in to my other considerations below

My 'overflow' / alternative week four is a #fediverse #chat deployment of some sort... I couldn't decide which one to install though!

Week four I also considered the #defederated #riff.cc (but I don't think its easy enough for me to install that yet).