Tag: Twitter

I recently toot’d¹ that despite having a decent set of “followed” hashtags on my instance I just wasn’t seeing any content coming in for them. This was frustrating me and having done a bit of investigation into how ActivityPub functions turns out is just the way it is ™️.

pieceofthepie

@pieceofthepie@n8e.dev

As I scroll through my feed seeing the same old faces (love y'all) I've come to the realisation that my subscribed hashtags are doing very little.

Guess that's a "running my own" instance thing. 😢

I've got relays, but those seem to be mostly made up of other small instances. relay.fedi.buzz could have helped but doesn't seem to add anything new.

#Discoverability seems hard work if you're not on a big instance. My posts feed up, others don't feed down all that much.

#Fediverse #MastoAdmin

Mar 24, 2024, 11:00 · 1 · 8

If you’re a Twitter user (and even if you’re not) you may be aware that it was recently acquired by one Elon Musk. You may also be aware that he’s gone on a cost cutting rampage that has left people concerned for the future of the platform as mass layoffs and publicised technical changes have resulted in broken functionality or massive shareholder losses.

There is a Twitter alternative, just one amongst many, called Mastodon. It’s a part of something called the Fediverse; which is a silly word that fundamentally groups a large number of applications around something called the ActivityPub protocol. In brief it’s a well defined method for clients and servers to talk to each other about people and what they’re doing. Which is why, over the last few weeks, Mastodon servers (or instances) have seen a massive spike in new user accounts and usage. People are migrating and instance owners have been scrambling to scale up their infrastructure to cope.

You can always join one of the many instances available, or, like I did you can run your own¹.