Baldur Bjarnason

... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development

These are his notes

The spread of ActivityPub (or, how am I going to handle cross-posting now?)

So, due to the magic of ‘open standards’ I now find myself with two ActivityPub accounts instead of one: ‘Micro.blog + Mastodon’

(Or, will find, pending a switch to SSL for the custom domain I use for this notes blog.)

On the one hand, this is an amazing example of what an open standard enables and proves that despite its idiosyncrasies and quirks, ActivityPub is a practical specification (the best kind of specification).

On the other hand, now I need to rethink my cross-posting tactics.

Currently, the notes blog (hosted by micro.blog) is the source of most of my social media posting. I post images, links, short notes, etc on the notes blog and micro.blog cross-posts to Twitter, which in turn cross-posts to Mastodon via moa.party.

It’s a bit hacky, but it works, and I set it up that way because I expected micro.blog to roll out Mastodon cross-posting.

Which, in hindsight, was clearly a half-baked idea because Mastodon is built on an open standard and so there’s nothing preventing micro.blog from becoming a full member of the ‘fediverse’.

So, now I potentially am going to have two usernames on the fediverse @baldur@toot.cafe and, I guess, @baldur@notes.baldurbjarnason.com once the SSL gets activated.

That’d be fine, normally. Plenty of people juggle different Mastodon accounts. But those tend to be accounts for focusing on different topics and I’m very bad at segregating the topics I’m interested in.

For now, I’m going to keep things as they are and see how it goes. But I’m also open to suggestions if any of you have any.