Share to Mastodon from OEG Connect

[cogdog]

I know where I am going after Twitter (yes, I am post twitter, not deleted, just put away in a basement box)…

My focus now is none of the commercial alternatives, why go through the same thing again, federated is the only way to go. I’m all in Mastodon. I’m not wanting to battle platforms, just asserting my personal choice.

To pick up a call from last year, if you have joined Mastodon, please modify your OEG Connect profiles

And thanks @catherinecronin for putting out a call…

Catherine Cronin (@catherinecronin@mastodon.ie)

To that end, I fiddled in the server room to add a new feature, any place you see a Share Link icon (for a topic, a reply, it;s the button), this allows finding a copiable link to share, or being able to send out via email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn… and as of today, you can share a connect link to Mastodon.

First, click a share link:

Copy the link if you want it, but try the new Mastodon button

This opens a Mastodon share box the first time you use it. Enter the address for your instance, like mine is social.fossdle.org and click Save It might make you login, but if already done, now you are in the place to compose your message to post with the link

Your computer should save your choice, so the next time you go directly to the post composition (add something to go with the link)

And publish! There it goes… or here it is

Alan Levine (@cogdog@social.fossdle.org)

Thus you can share all kinds of OEG Connect stuff in the Fediverse.

Get Federated? Yes! With us. OEGlobal is also there as @oeglobal@social.fossdle.org

For Those Running Discourse

We use the social share theme component which adds more sources to the built in share options of discourse (email, twitter, and facebook only). These are our settings where we have added links to share to LinkedIn and Mastodon

Social Share links
Mastodon, fab-mastodon, Share to Mastodon, https://mastodonshare.com/?url=

LinkedIn, fab-linkedin, Share to LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=

svg icons
fab-linkedin,fab-mastodon

[lightweight]

Great to see it, Alan! I found my people in the Fediverse for sure - much prefer it to Twitter, even in its heyday.

And at some point, people will realise that LinkedIn is just Twitter with a different (but equally undesirable) master.

[cogdog]

I hope so, but I’ve been a bit surprised in the edu space how much the LinkedIn has been embraced. Shrug.

I have quit twice, but was forced for one situation to be able to login. I have created the least significant account there, a case for the worst profile ever, a name, a silly icon and a link to my calling card site (self hosted WordPress).

[lightweight]

I deleted my account on LinkedIn when Microsoft acquired them, because, as you know, I don’t have any respect for them or the monopoly they rode in on. I, too, have had to create a ‘burner’ account under a pseudonym to read the post people have tried to point me towards, but which a within the ‘walled garden’. I consider it a major imposition to be required to deal with LinkedIn (or Microsoft for that matter) on any level.

[lightweight]

Oh, and thanks for the pointer to the enhanced social media functionality for Discourse - that’s my work for the morning (to apply the same to our couple Discoursen )!

[chrisaldrich]

For those looking to stay away from big corporate social, another useful (and easy) potential option for those who have WordPress websites, is to add the new ActivityPub plugin (or configure the option if you’re using WordPress.com). This will make your website both federate and look like a Mastodon instance to those using Mastodon or other platforms using the ActivityPub protocol it is built on.

You can then post anything you like to your own website whether its articles, short notes (like Twitter, Mastodon, etc.), photos, etc. Folks can subscribe to your site as if it were it’s own Mastodon (or similar ActivityPub) Instance. People on Mastodon, PixelFed, etc. can follow you using their accounts to see your content and reply to it. Those replies then show up in your comments section. You’ll get some of the benefits of Mastodon without needing to rely on someone else’s rules, issues, or worry about them disappearing with your content. As an example, you can follow my personal website by searching for and following @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com on Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms.

For those who prefer other options in this arena, but don’t want to deal with the maintenance, an incredibly inexpensive way to have your own website that federates with Mastodon is to use Micro.Blog which not only also has ActivityPub functionality built in from the start but has a nice reading and interaction experience similar to Twitter. As a company, they’re much smaller and consciously going out of their way to make much wiser and healthier choices about how they structure their social media space while still allowing people better ownership and control of their content. I’ve seen some of our friends like Kathleen Fitzgerald, Dan Cohen, and Alan Jacobs participating there for several years. I suspect that others in the ethical education technology space will appreciate and respect micro.blog’s philosophy, kindness, generosity and very IndieWeb approach.

[lightweight]

Yup - here at the OER Foundation, we’ve got a couple ActivityPub-equipped blogs if people want to test it out - https://oerfoundation.org and https://fossdle.org are both examples. See @lightweight & @mackiwg@oerfoundation.org and @fossdle.org for example. It’s quite cool - if you follow us, you’ll see posts on your preferred ActivityPub client when we post stuff.

[cogdog]

It is nifty how it works and the setup is very streamlined. Yes, its a way to have your blogposts go into the fediverse, but it ends up it’s own voice, separate from a mastodon identity, That might be tricky to understand (for me too!)

If I understand right, you only get new posts after following. I’ve played a bit with a test wordpress.com site, where you end up with a New York, New York style handle- I am @cogdoglab.wordpress.com@cogdoglab.wordpress.com

I subscribed and got my first ActivtyPub post published, sent a comment from Mastodon, and it worked. But the original fediverse post vanished.

And with some fun, apparently I joined the fediverse in the year 1000

Anyhow, the point is wrapping one’s head around how interconnected this is. I have been toying too with Pixelfed for federated photos and it is neat how you can follow a pixelfed user in Mastodon, and have back and forth comments.

[chrisaldrich]

You’re always so ahead of the curve @cogdog! I imagine if you file any bugs against their Github repo, they’d get cleaned up pretty quickly. (They’ve only released the v1.0 recently and I know there’s more on the roadmap. GitHub - Automattic/wordpress-activitypub: ActivityPub for WordPress)

[chrisaldrich]

The interface for WordPress and the plugin don’t (yet?) provide a Mastodon reader, so instead I’ve been subscribing to the RSS feeds of various people and hashtags in my feed readers or social readers of choice. (Here is a great reason to have even a free micro.blog account which will let you subscribe to Mastodon accounts, Tumblogs, and most other types of sites.)

Hashtag Example: #OER23 using https://mastodon.social/tags/OER23.rss
As a caveat, feeds don’t fully federate across the entirety of the space, but only to the instances that can “see” specific tags. As a result, I recommend subscribing to versions of tags on some of the biggest instances like mastodon.social which are likely to be aware of the broadest arrays of the hashtagged conversations. (Of course, one should be aware that this also opens one up to potential abuse of hashtags as we’ve seen in Twittersphere.)

User example: this follows the format of [instance]/users/[username].rss or .atom or this format which includes replies if you want them: [instance]/@[username]/with_replies.rss or .atom,

So try:

• Catherine Cronin using https://mastodon.ie/users/catherinecronin.rss
• Catherine Cronin using https://mastodon.ie/@catherinecronin/with_replies.rss

You can also try to get the feeds of entire servers (I don’t recommend this for bandwidth reasons, especially for large servers) using https://openrss.org, but if you know of tiny communities, then perhaps something like https://openrss.org/toolsforthought.rocks/public/local would be of use?

Out of curiosity, is anyone maintaining an OER Planet out there?