Tom Lee-Gough



Adventures in the Fediverse

After careful consideration, I've created a Mastodon server for CoraxFM myself. It's not actually that careful, but it was something that I wanted to experiment with.

For those that don't know, Mastodon is a type of social media with functionality somewhere between Facebook and Twitter. There are lots of explainers out there of Mastodon, and more widely the fediverse, so I'll keep this brief. The main difference is that it is federated, that means that anyone can run a server, and still interact with people on difference servers and services. You're on Facebook and want to reply to a Tweet? Tough luck. You're on Linkedin and you want to post a YouTube comment? Create a YouTube account. The fediverse use a protocol called ActivityPub to interact between services. Don't like Mastodon's user interface? No problems, there's Plemora, or Akkoma, or plenty of others.

Think of federation like email. Email providers don't care if you use Gmail, or Hotmail, or your own self-host email. They can still interact. Like email, running your own server means that you get to have an "official" presense in the fediverse. For example, my profile would be found at @tom@social.coraxfm.uk@tom@social.huginn.uk.

It also means that I get to update my automation workflow. With a bit of luck, this post will make it's way to the Mastodon feed automatically.

2023-08-07 EDIT: I've decommissioned CoraxFM's Mastodon server in favour of social.huginn.uk, my personal domain.