I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.

I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).

By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!

One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.

One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.

The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).

Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:

• Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
• Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
  
  • this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
  • it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.

  
  

• Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
• Imported the export from the other instance.
• Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
  
  • … while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.

  
  

There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:

• Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
• The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.

So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.

I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.

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#100DaysToOffload #activitypub #coryDoctorow #data #diodeZone #fedidevs #fediverse #makertube #migration #portability #streaming #video #YouTube

Andy Piper

2023-07-31 12:04:45

In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.

Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.

There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.

Why so many?

• Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
  
  • my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
  • I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.

  
  

• Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
• There was the time when I was copying friends like Andy Stanford-Clark and Tom Coates, and putting sensors around my house online (there’s brief mention of it in this 2009 post).
• There were test accounts I created for projects as far back as my time doing Service Oriented Architecture things at IBM.
• There were a couple of accounts I’d created during education sessions, literally to show others how to get started on Twitter, growing the user base.
• There were a couple of accounts from my demo apps and projects on the @TwitterDev team, such as the IoT sensors I demonstrated on stage at the first Twitter Flight conference in 2014.
• There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.

Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X.

In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.

… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!

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