People who know me know that I am not really active on Social Media, and by Social Media I am referring to the sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Instead I use Mastodon which is an open source equivalent of Twitter and Pixel which is an Opensource version of Instagram. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter because it doesn’t show me what I want to see, which is updates from friends.
Facebook is basically trying to show you stuff that keeps you on the site for as long as possible and it also tries to push Incel, misogynist, white supremacy and Flat earth conspiracy theories to you. You might think that I am yet another doomsayer who is ‘anti-capitalist’, anti-tech etc but this statement is based on personal experience. I have a Facebook account that I created over a decade ago for testing scripts that would push posts to Facebook automatically. I have never used it for surfing content or liked any account/post etc from it. A few days ago I was changing the passwords on all my accounts and logged into the site for the first time in a while using this account. What I noticed was that the site was pushing accounts that were either trying to teach you to pick up girls, posts on flat earth, Cockroach Janta Party and then pro-trump posts. It shows you how they are pushing a certain agenda and a majority of the posts seem to be auto generated AI slop.
In any case, as I have posted earlier all posts on this blog are auto published on Mastodon and all comments/likes etc are synced back here automatically. Basically the site is a full fledged node on Mastodon. I use the official plugin called ActivityPub to achieve this and it has worked fantastically so far. The same folks have recently released a plugin called ATmosphere that does the same thing for BlueSky. BlueSky is the unofficial successor/replacement for Twitter and a lot of folks who were active on Twitter migrated to BlueSky when Twitter was taken over by Musk.
I do have a blue sky account but am not super active over there. I keep the account alive because a lot of folks I like to follow are active there. Till recently the only way I could Federate the blog posts to BlueSky was to push the post to Mastodon, where a bridge account posted it to BlueSky and then I would manually republish it. But all that is in the past now. With the new plugin I installed yesterday the Blog posts are auto posted to BlueSky directly under my account there automatically and when people on Bluesky reply, like, or repost what you shared, those reactions show up as comments on the post you made and approved comments left here on this Blog are sent right back to Bluesky as replies under the original post. This way I can remove the manual steps for BlueSky and hopefully this will showcase the stuff I post to a wider audience and get more visitors to the Blog :).
This post will be the first (non-test) post that gets published to BlueSky and Mastodon simultaneously.
– Suramya