I installed the Hum link shortener on The New Leaf Journal and I like it thus far. Now I just played around with the ActivityPub WordPress plugin settings so I am trying this post to see how it looks from Mastodon. Don’t mind me. (I should also figure out why my New Leaf Journal posts stopped showing up through the AP plugin but that’s another matter.)
Tag: mastodon
Minds Hashtags and Mastodon
Nicholas A. FerrellI have a social media account on Minds. Minds added ActivityPub support not too long ago. I had been able to follow my Minds account from Mastodon and follow my Mastodon account from Minds. However, posts were not showing up in either case. Today, I was surprised to discover my most recent Minds pos...
I wrote a post a few days ago about how my Minds posts are now visible from my Mastodon instance. I noted one issue, however. Minds has a praiseworthy set up where users can add hashtags separate from the post. I noted that I liked the set up last year on The New Leaf Journal, and Minds subsequently improved it by making the hashtags visible while still separating from the post. However, Minds has always allowed people to put the hashtags in the body of the post similarly to other social media platforms and software. When using Minds’ method for separating hashtags from the post body, the hashtags are invisible on Mastodon (I have not tested on any other ActivityPub-based clients). I tried writing my hashtags into the body of a Minds post and they carried over to Mastodon as expected. Consider this something to keep in mind if you use Minds and have followers on Mastodon or similar Fediverse networks.
Minds to Mastodon
I have a social media account on Minds. Minds added ActivityPub support not too long ago. I had been able to follow my Minds account from Mastodon and follow my Mastodon account from Minds. However, posts were not showing up in either case. Today, I was surprised to discover my most recent Minds post in my Mastodon timeline, which I promptly boosted.
I have two outstanding issues. Firstly, my Mastodon posts are still not being picked on Minds. Secondly, Minds hashtags are not being picked up by Mastodon. However, I am using Minds’ nice method for adding hashtags instead of writing them directly into the post. I will write some hashtags into the post body to see if those carry over to Mastodon. While I would like to see Minds add support for RSS/ATOM feeds, its ActivityPub and separate NOSTR implementations show a good commitment to federation.
Feeds for Articles Over X and Mastodon
I realized that I had been using Twitter, and now Mastodon, as an information hub rather than a social network. I was following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites; I was following bots to get content from link aggregators. Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for that job.
I came across an interesting passage by blogger Facundo Olano in his blog post about creating a personal feed reader to follow good and meaningful writing from around the web (see the source code for his interesting feed reader project). He assessed his prior usage of Twitter (now “X”) and Mastodon and realized that he was “following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites,” in effect “following bots to get content from link aggregators.” He concluded that “Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for the job.” I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Olano’s assessment as well as his preference for using personal feed readers to stay abreast of updates from interesting authors instead of social media platforms such as Facebook, X (or Twitter), and even Mastodon. Feeds are the best way for following individual websites and authors (combined with newsletters in some cases). Social media and networking serve different purposes, but I will grant that they can play a limited role in discovering new authors and articles (preferably combined with a read-it-later tool).