The ease of Ivory on Mastodon has me sharing a lot more than I had been over the last few years. Ivory is on my phone, tablet, and my laptop. It is very easy to write a post, share an image, boost someone else’s post, link to a good blog post, etc.
My homegrown static site generator Tuff is super simple to publish with too. It is far easier than WordPress was towards the end of my use with it. However, Ivory on Mastodon is even easier than Tuff. When publishing is frictionless I’m more likely to share.
Because of this ease of publishing, I’ve been posting far more on Mastodon than here on my blog. At least, more of the shorter titleless posts. And because Mastodon is an open platform, supports RSS, etc. I don’t feel as though I’m publishing for someone else’s benefit. I don’t feel as though I’m lobbing stones into a volcano like I would if I was tweeting.
I’ve decided to double down on Mastodon. I plan to publish more there, not less. I’ve added my Mastodon RSS feed to my Micro.blog account. And I plan to structure my posts far more like I would structure my posts here on my blog. I’m treating my Mastodon account not as just another social media account, but as a first class publishing platform for my content.
I’m planning on moving my accounts to my own instance on my own domain. The Mastodon project has gotten a lot of attention over the last several months and that has had some benefits on the underlying code. The recent releases have really improved the application, its storage and process needs, etc. And I can only imagine that will continue. It is my hope that by the time I set up my own instance the project will have gotten a lot of great updates that I’ll benefit from.
One side benefit of publishing to Mastodon rather than my blog is the ease that others have of sharing my content. Engagement on Mastodon is rather high. Look at Cabel Sasser’s findings. Some of my posts have gotten a fair number of boosts. This one had over 400 boosts. I have several with more than 100. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know I don’t collect nor care about statistics — but these numbers do tell a story. The microblogosphere is alive and well. People can publish their thoughts and be heard. They aren’t being hidden behind some algorithm that is optimized for ad revenue.
It is a very exciting time and I’m happy to be part of it.
As for my blog here. I still plan on publishing blog posts, entries into my portfolio of crazy projects and more podcast episodes. I may even build a way to bring some of the content I publish on Mastodon back onto this site in some way. The future looks fun!
Side note: I hope that Tapbots or Iconfactory end up building an all-in-one app that plugs into the fediverse but also lets you publish content on your own domain either via Micro.blog, WordPress, or some other platform that has ActivityPub built in. Or, perhaps any platform that has ActivityPub. The pieces all certainly seem to be there. And at least Iconfactory seems to be toying with the idea. How cool!