As I said before, Friendica is fantastic. You can even add an RSS feed from a website to your home feed there.

Today I took that a step further and set up a new account that mirrors all of the incoming news posts from a website into the Fediverse. That way all of us (well, those who follow) can now see news posts from my hometown (that doesn’t seem to like anything outside the walled gardens of X and BlueSky). And I don’t have to curate anymore when reposting as it’s all automated.

Since Friendica is part of the Fediverse and supports the Activity Pub protocol, users from all services that use the that protocol too (e.g. Mastodon, Firefish, or Hubzilla) can follow this new account just like they would follow another user account on their own instance and/or social media service.

I had to work my way through a number of settings for for my new profile and the RSS driven contact but as long as you are a little technically minded and clear about what you are trying to achieve, it’s fairly straight forward. However, I would not recommend this for someone who is completely new to Friendica. Learn your way around the service first, so that you understand what all the elements and settings are for.

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/12/06/using-an-rss-feed-in-friendica/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #HowToFediverse #Mastodon #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse

Ever thought of using an RSS feed to add posts from a website into your home feed?

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #RSS #Mastodon #Friendica

http://sylkeweb.com/2023/12/06/using-an-rss-feed-in-friendica/

I‘ve updated my blog post about the interconnectivity of Fediverse services with a new table. There are still many gaps where I need to test more but here we go for now:
https://sylkeweb.com/2023/10/15/testing-the-fediverses-interconnectivity-how-it-all-began-or-the-fediverse-is-more-than-mastodon/

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse
#WordPress #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Firefish #Hubzilla

Posting to my WordPress blog using Friendica

A symbol for the Fediverse

https://loma.ml/display/373ebf56-2065-5bdb-b365-9c2278452026

The more I‘m finding my way around the Fediverse, the more I‘m enamoured with Friendica. It has so many useful features that make it incredibly versatile.

Earlier this evening I read a post describing how you can post from your Friendica account straight to your WordPress blog , so I decided I need to test it out.

My first attempts didn‘t work. I only generated a Friendica post, nothing arrived in my blog. I had a sneaky suspicion that this had something to do with the two factor authentication that I use on WordPress. After a lot of looking through possible settings in WordPress‘s labyrinthine user interface, I stumbled into my User Profile and spotted Security. In there I was able to set up an application password for Friendica and bingo, my next posting attempt went through.

What I didn’t quite expect was that the test post was automatically distributed via my two Mastodon accounts that WordPress is connected to. I get the feeling that I‘ll also have to add hashtags and categories from within WordPress but for good measure I‘ll add some hashtags to this Friendica post. And a picture.

If Mastodon is the easy entry point to the Fediverse for most users, then Friendica is the next level up for those people who prefer to write their posts in a more feature rich environment. However, it takes a bit of time to learn about everything it can do.

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #WordPress #Friendica

Read the original post and comment stream on Friendica

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/11/20/posting-to-my-wordpress-blog-using-friendica/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #HowToFediverse #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse #WordPress

A quick blog post as this was getting too long for a Mastodon post.

For most people social media comes as a dedicated app these days. However, all of the services can be accessed via a web browser too and usually this gives access to a more feature rich experience. I’m the web browser kind of person, trying to find out everything you can do with a specific social media service and to bend them to my needs wherever possible – but I have also used apps, when they were well done, like Tweetbot.

I’m not sure about the terminology as I’m not a programmer but I’ve come across the term “frontend” recently and from what I understand, this means the interface that is used to access the main service. So an app would be a typical frontend that people are familiar with, presenting a service in its own unique way. There are also “web clients”, they do the same but within a web browser. Some of them are made by the same people who own the service, some aren’t. They all have in common that you need to enter your service credentials and trust the interface owners not to abuse them.

With everything that happened to Twitter/X a lot of people were looking for a replacement that offered a similar experience. A number of apps and web clients for Mastodon were developed to provide that to a degree but because Twitter/X and Mastodon are not the same this did not always work out. See a list of web clients here, some popular apps are Ivory, IceCubes, etc.

Some of the frontends to services kind of warp the original service experience quite a bit. It should not really have surprised me that much as I had come across web clients for Mastodon already that tried to do that too but there is one called Newsmast that does it even more so than others. Newsmast is a Mastodon project centred around “communities”. It gathers posts from across the Fediverse (e.g. from Pixelfed) and presents them as feeds/streams/channels (not sure what to call them) that people can subscribe too. This helps quite a lot when you are new to the Fediverse and struggle with finding content for your home feed that suits you. I can see this feature being appealing to newcomers.

The one thing I really don’t like about Newsmast is its preselection of social links users can enter. There is everything I want to stay away from and Twitter does not even exist under that name anymore. Even though Newsmast is part of the Fediverse and actively pulls in posts from all kinds of Fediverse services into its “communities” feeds, there are no other Fediverse services listed in the “Socials” and the only field that allows you to enter a “free” link is the Website one. I just tried entering my Pixelfed account under Instagram and it was reformatted into an Instagram address. It’s like Newsmast is living in the past, sorry.

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The best place to comment or ask questions about this post is my Mastodon – Testing account: Sylkeweb on Mastodon

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/11/17/mastodon-frontends-newsmast/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #HowToFediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFrontEnd #MastodonWebClient #Newsmast #Pixelfed #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse

Reminder to self: always post the best photos of a photo group on Pixelfed (or Friendica or WordPress etc.) in the first four positions so that other services like Mastodon (or Firefish etc.) show those!

The ones showing up here are mostly fine but there are more and I prefer some of them over the ones showing up in my Mastodon feed.
https://pixelfed.social/p/Sylkeweb/627100727936063739

#Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #WordPress #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Firefish #Hubzilla

Being fed up with the shenanigans at the walled garden social media hubs like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I was on the lookout for something more exciting and less frustrating (keyword “Enshittification”). In November 2022 I set up an account on a Mastodon instance and quickly after that, two accounts on different Pixelfed instances. I wanted to use them for separate purposes: Mastodon like Twitter, and Pixelfed like Instagram for my Home Cooking and Photography interests.

Because of the nature of the Fediverse with each of its different social media services spread over many instances, it seemed tricky at the beginning to find accounts to connect to, especially for Home Cooking. At some point I read about Groups and I thought that’s a concept worth trying to find more people with the same interest. I set up a Home Cooking group on chirp.social and pretty quickly found some stumbling stones in the way I was trying to use it.

That’s when I first realised that most things in the Fediverse work quite well as long as you stick with Mastodon as your base because many useful additions are geared towards it, groups and WordPress blog linking are good examples for that. But there are many more social media services which are supposed to interconnect with each other using the ActivityPub protocol and not a lot of information about which service works best for what. When you find a problem there is hardly anybody who had the same kind of issue as it seems that most people stay within just one service bubble. So I started joining other services and started following my own accounts just for the fun of it.

At the point of writing I have accounts on these services (the plan is to try even more):

• Mastodon (similar to Twitter)
• Pixelfed (similar to Instagram)
• Friendica (similar to Facebook)
• Firefish (was Calckey) (similar to Twitter)
• Hubzilla (seems like the grandparent of social media, but don’t let the seemingly very simple interface lure you into underestimating its powers)
• Diaspora (I haven’t had a lot of time to test yet but because it uses a different protocol its interconnectivity is very limited)
• WordPress (a blog service)
• In addition I have a group administrator account on chirp.social and have interactions with a group on gup.pe

Juggling my various accounts I got so confused about what works and what doesn’t between them that I set up a big table that I was completing bit by bit, ticking off open questions in a more strategic way. Some issues that I found are caused by the specific setup of a service, others have no explanation whatsoever. Especially commenting on posts from a different service and then answering them can be a sticky issue. I should probably join GitHub to log everything, but I have no time for that kind of engagement right now.

I realised quickly that the table format is not the clearest way to show what is going on between services, so with my latest new account that joined the Fediverse (this WordPress blog), I decided to write a whole post highlighting what works and what doesn’t from the perspective of a blog user (WordPress and the Fediverse). The plan is to do this for the other services too.

This is where I got to so far with my table (updated 4/12/23, can be downloaded as PDF below the image):

🟢✅✅ Green fields means that interactions between services seem to work well in both directions – or not at all (but intentionally so, e.g. because of a different protocol). 

🟡✅💢 Yellow fields means there are either some one sided problems or some weird things happen that I still need to research further.

🔴💢❌ Red fields means something does not work at all.

⚪️❤️ White fields with hearts contain short comments about the services.
It’s best to ignore these for now as I’m still learning about the ins and outs of some of them and most likely do them a disservice out of ignorance.

⚪️ Just white means that I have not tested yet.

DISCLAIMER: The table is obviously not complete in any way and based on my personal experiences trying out pretty basic tasks. Sometimes problems are caused by just one single instance and how code is implemented there.
At the same time services get updates and issues I have seen might just magically disappear.
Or new ones appear. 😅

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The best place to comment or ask questions about this post is my Mastodon – Testing account: Sylkeweb on Mastodon

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/10/15/testing-the-fediverses-interconnectivity-how-it-all-began-or-the-fediverse-is-more-than-mastodon/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Firefish #Friendica #HowToFediverse #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pixelfed #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse #WordPress

Testing the Fediverse’s interconnectivity - how it all began or “The Fediverse is more than Mastodon”.😅

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #WordPress #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Firefish #Hubzilla

http://sylkeweb.com/2023/10/15/testing-the-fediverses-interconnectivity-how-it-all-began-or-the-fediverse-is-more-than-mastodon/