Being more or less social

A screenshot of my profile on the Bluesky social network.

Good grief, has it really been almost 6 months since my last blog post?

I mostly dropped by to link out to a couple of additional social media profiles that you can follow, should you wish to. I appreciate that many people are leaving Twitter/X/whatever Elon Musk decides it’s called this week, and not everyone is leaving in the same direction.

Firstly, I’ve just signed up to Bluesky. It’s invite only at the moment, so I doff my cap to a work colleague who gave me her first invite. I’ve just made the one post there and I’ll see how I get on with it.

I managed to – eventually – get my account verified there, which is how I show as ‘@neilturner.me.uk’ and not a bsky.social address. It should have been straightforward, but over the years my DNS settings have seemingly got out of sync, and this has required some fixing. Hopefully everything works now.

And I’m on Meta’s Threads, which I joined on launch day back in August. Again, I’ve just made the one post there. It doesn’t look like many people that I followed on Instagram are active on Threads – my feed seems to basically be the same 5 people.

My primary social media presence is still on Mastodon. So, if you want to hear from me in between my massive gaps in blogging, that’s probably your best bet. I joined Mastodon back in November 2022, and I feel most-settled there.

Perhaps if Bluesky and/or Threads open up a bit more, I might cross-post things, but we’ll see.

WordPress in the Fediverse

A screenshot of the settings page for the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress

If I’ve set up everything correctly, then you should be able to subscribe to this blog in your favourite Fediverse app, such as Mastodon, by following @nrturner@neilturner.me.uk .

You’ll need to install the ActivityPub plugin, and then it should just work where your fediverse username is @your-wordpress-username@your-domain.tld. If you’ve used a plugin to disable author archives, such as Yoast’s SEO plugin, you’ll need to re-enable it for this to work.

I found this guide particularly useful, as it links to Webfinger to test that you’ve set it up correctly.

(Update: since this post was written almost 12 months ago, the ActivityPub plugin has been formally adopted by Automattic and so enjoys wider support)

Good intentions and Mastodon

Screenshot of my Mastodon profile

Well, here was me promising to blog here more regularly, and then completely ignoring the blog for 5 months. Go me?

The main purpose of this blog post is to include a link to my Mastodon profile. As I write this, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and looks to be unleashing his libertarian hellscape vision very quickly. Whilst I don’t intend to leave Twitter, I’ve decided to keep my options open and have set myself up on Mastodon.lol, which is an LGBTQ+-friendly server that doesn’t integrate with any servers that host fascists.

Whilst we’ve been here before with Ello, App.net, Google+, Clubhouse and innumerable other sites that have tried to compete with Twitter and failed, Mastodon seems to be the most popular ‘non-fascsist site’. Good, lord, what a thing to have to type.

We’ll see what happens, eh?