 Recording is on. There you go. So yeah, I'm really kind of excited to chat about Macedon. We've been kind of experimenting a lot with it at Reclaim in various ways in terms of hosting it and how to make it easier to use, easier to host, I should say, and sort of the capabilities of it, as well as obviously there's a lot of interest around the internet about Macedon and Fediverse related tools generally. I'm particularly interested in, it's not something I know a lot about yet intimately, but I'm really interested in kind of learning more about Activity Pub, like the core sort of standard that makes federated services like Macedon and Pixel Fed, we were talking about work because I think there's a lot of promise there, but it's been something that I've been kind of digging into and trying to learn what makes it tick and I'm still kind of doing that. But yeah, I'm really interested to kind of dig into that. I don't really want to talk a lot in this community chat about Twitter. I don't really think anyone does, right? But there's a lot to be, a lot has been said and stuff on there, but I'm really personally really excited to see kind of how the communities, these small communities that have been growing and seeing for me the Fediverse become an actual real thing in the last couple months. I've been aware of Macedon and tools like it, but I've never really dove in myself because that's not where the people I was interested in following were and that has definitely changed for me. So the last couple of months, that's really cool. But yeah, Macedon, it's only been around since like 2016 as an open source project as far as I'm aware and the activity pub standard that it uses has been doing a little bit of research. For my understanding, it's not even an official W3C standard. It's a proposal, but is pretty well understood to be like a stable proposal. Like it's not necessarily doing breaking changes. So there's a lot of things that implement it and I'm interested in following that space, but I think we're still kind of waiting on a, like I think you can look at RSS and when something says it uses RSS, you have a reasonable expectation of what it does. And I don't think I'm there yet with activity pub because there's a lot of tools that say, yeah, we use activity pub and can post things. But then when rubber comes a road of like, well, what does that mean? What does it look like? Is where I'm still kind of figuring out and experimenting. But yeah, I'm really kind of curious anyone here in the call, you know, what their experience is with using masks on how long they've been using it, what they've been seeing, like what their experience has been with it so far. I mean, maybe you've been using it for a long time, but or a couple of weeks or so. I can jump in and say that I am a brand new beginner. So I'm still trying to make sense of it honestly and understanding, you know, like I think I accidentally created two accounts that once are within a span of a couple of days because I didn't realize that my single account could be applied to multiple hosts or versions or, you know, instances, you can, I'm really kind of showing how little I know about it, but it's been fun to play around and just, it's hard for me to not talk about Twitter just in terms of comparing it, but I'll try to not jump too much into that, but. I should specify, I don't wanna talk about Elon Musk. That's what I mean. Sounds good. So it has been interesting because I am just sort of naturally comparing it. And I know that Reclaim has thought about making the move or I think Reclaim Hosting does have an account and mask it on now. And we're trying to just think about how we're gonna be communicating in both spaces, but yeah, I'd be curious to know how others are using it or if someone wants to share their screen and walk through it, you know, that's why I'm here is just getting a sense of how others are thinking about it because it's brand new for me. One of the things that you touched on and I think this is just sort of the biggest challenge for Macedon is like coming to grips with instances and your accounts on them and what that means and what you, I think a lot of people who have like at least poked around in Macedon understand that like, hey, there are instances and they can talk to each other, like once you dig in, you'll find that out pretty quick that you can follow folks on other instances and things like that, but that's not necessarily given. I will say plenty, I'm really maybe talking more like folks maybe in this circle who are showing up to a Reclaim Hosting community chat are probably in many cases likely aware of that once they've looked into it, but I have been interested to see the two things. So I've been kind of intentionally talking about Macedon with friends of mine who aren't really into tech at all. And the awareness of that is like all over the place. Some people have never heard of it, some people have. Most people don't know what I just said about the following folks between different instances, the federated part. That's a really kind of hard thing to get your head around. And then the second thing, which is like, yeah, how do I manage accounts? That was my big question going into it is I understood the following thing, but I was like, well, people say you can pick whatever instance, but what happens when I have to move because my instance is going away or I don't like the decisions that they're making or something, you know, whatever, whatever reason. Like that's empowering that these small communities can form, but what is my what can I do about it as just a user on an instance? And seeing that Macedon has a pretty simple like export, you can go into your profile, say I want to export my stuff and move it over to another instance and then you can just import it over there. That was great. But I think the thing I really didn't understand was the redirect. So you can actually say, I'm now over here and when folks visit your Macedon account at the old server, it will say, hey, they're actually on this server now, but way more cool than that, it will also redirect folks who are following you so that it should just follow right over. And that's something I've only played with a little bit. Like I did it on one occasion, I'm gonna probably do it again here at some point. Right now I'm on the DS106 server that Jim's been maintaining, but I think I'm gonna try just so I can stay familiar with it to do my own, just one personal Macedon. Although I'll say, I think I'm gonna miss the local timeline because I like that feature where you can see everyone on the server, especially on a small server like DS106, I think that's pretty cool. But yeah, it'll be good for me to remain familiar with it. But seeing that implementation in that redirect thing, just working is interesting, but I think scary. Like if you haven't done it before, and even if you're listening now and being like, I understand what he's saying, but like, does it actually work that way? That's kind of scary. And that's I think a big problem. And even taking a step back, it's a big problem to even understand all of that capability. That's just, I had someone who, a friend of mine who works as a UX designer for a pretty large like web development company who was like, yeah, I've heard about web Macedon, but I don't really know what it's about. And I explained it and they're like, that's a UX nightmare. They should fix that. And I was like, well, I don't know that fix, like what does fix it mean, right? Like, cause that's inherent. Taylor, I tried to describe Macedon like email. Yeah. Like, yes, you can get edback at gmail.com. You could also get edback at yahoo.com. So the beginning and the end are both important to your handle. It's tricky though, cause the difference, I think that, I mean, that from like a perspective of how that works, I think that's a good metaphor, but where that breaks down is people go, yeah, but like when I get a new email address, it's because I don't want people. You're emailing me at my old one and it's showing up there in some cases. Obviously you can forward email and people do that, but I think that's the tricky thing. And it mostly does work that way, right? You set up a forward email, you'd set up a redirect in Macedon. But I think that is so far, I think the difference is most people don't actually care that much about their email address. And some people do care about their social profiles. Hi, I'm Jim Groom and I have a Macedon problem. I've been on Macedon for one month and change and I now have three servers set up. And so I'll show you quickly what that looks like. I didn't want to interrupt you, Lauren, no. Oh no, it's fine. And maybe again, I just need to play around with it more, but I think, and I like how you're addressing it. I've tried to take a similar approach too with thinking about it like email addresses. I sometimes wonder though, given this is a social platform or a space where you're supposed to be connecting and finding others in the community, I worry that it's harder to find people in Macedon because both the beginning and the end is different. And if I'm in Reclaim.rocks right now and that's where I have my account, if I use the search bar there and I go to search for users, I'm only, is it true that I'm only searching for people who are also hosted in Reclaim.rocks or is it a larger search bar for anyone with a Macedon account? It will search beyond that instance. If you have the domain in there too. So that's the difference. But I have to know it though, right? And I guess that's where it is similar to email. It's like, if you know it, you're in luck. If you don't know it, you can't really find it in the same way. Yeah, so if you were to go to Reclaim.rocks and put in like TaylorJade in, just that, just TaylorJade, no ads, nothing. It may actually find me because it's possible that one of the thing is it's going to be looking for profiles it already knows about. And then if you have the at and the domain name on there, then it will find anyone, right? Cause it knows- That's not true, Taylor. Or at least it's not true on my Macedon. And it's possible- No, mine either. It's possible that there are differences based on upgrades and based on choices that the individuals have made. So if I just search for the name Lauren, for example, from my Macedon and I chose to be on the indie web, Mastodon, I see my first four reactions. One is from Mastodon.social. One is from mastodon.laurenweinstein.org. One of them is from jirna.host. So I'm going across the FETI verse right now. I'm looking at- Yeah, but those are accounts it already knows about, right? And by knows about, I'm not being real clear, but like it's not going to find any Macedon server anywhere with Lauren in the name like Twitter, like it would be possible to just type Lauren into Twitter and find literally every Twitter user with Lauren in their handle. But it's not limited to the server. It's limited to the federation of people who are connected to that server in some way. Yes, and I don't personally, I don't know enough to say, oh, they have to be followed or it has to be because there's, if you dig in this stuff, it gets a little bit complicated because there are things that Mastodon will do where they'll say, hey, I know about this server out there and it can do some searching there. But yeah, it knows about is where I, that's the end of my knowledge there. I don't know what knows about exactly means, but yes, the search isn't just local to the server. It's a little bit beyond that, but if you, but there are times like, you know, like if you type like even a popular account or something into your local Mastodon instance and search and you don't have the entire handle, it may not find it, that handle includes a domain name. One of the things I'm finding with it, so this is, so talking about my Mastodon problem, thank you for coming here. There'll be coffee and donuts after this session, but this is an account I made on DS106's Mastodon, which is social.thes106.us. And as you were alluding to earlier, there is this local feed of all the people that are on this server. So that's local to this server. And then there's the federated feed, which kind of brings in people that aren't, I'm not necessarily following, but maybe other people on this server are following or just maybe people are streaming in, but these are people that I by some connection can see and then follow and discover. I don't think so, Jim. I think that's trying to download the entire, that's like just scrolling, what is the most recent post on Mastodon? Not every Mastodon server though. That couldn't be though, because that would be way too much. It's the federated timeline. Again, it's like what your server knows about, right? So it's going at people, so anyone on DS106 who is following someone on any account on any other server, that's what's in the federated timeline. If you looked at every single thing published to Mastodon across every single Mastodon server, if you had a way to do that, it would be a lot more populated in the federated timeline. Like so I just did it and I have slow scrolling on, so that new items don't just automatically push it down. And in about the 10 seconds that I've been on there, 80 new items have been posted. I think that's not that many though, right? I think the difference is that you're on the indie web, it's a much more federated server. Which has got probably hundreds, if not thousands of people. And so you're getting, by being on that server, the connection of hundreds of thousands of exponentially connected. So it does make sense that you would see a lot more than I would on DS106. And if you did that, if you had an account on Mastodon.social, right? Run by the maintainers of Mastodon, doesn't take signups, but it's probably one of the largest ones. Your federated timeline there is probably useless in terms of how, because so many things are coming through it. I think even on a mid-sized server, your federated timeline is useless. Fair enough, yeah. And even, and I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the searching, finding people and crossing over. So the idea being that, for example, if Ed follows Jim, who's on a different server, then- I blocked Ed. Okay. Even so, but hypothetically, if Ed follows Jim who's on a different server, then people who Jim follows, regardless of server, you can search and see those people. Well, the cleaner thing to think about it is that a person's username on Mastodon includes the server that they're at too, right? So when you're looking for someone, you need, there should be two at symbols. Although you can leave one out and sometimes they'll figure out what you mean. But like, my Mastodon username is taylorjaden at social.ds106.us. You could go to a different server and register taylorjaden there. But that's not me, right? That's someone else. And I understand that part, but my thinking is who does end up being populated in searchable parts? Well, but my point is if you put the domain name, it'll find them regardless of what server they're on. It does not matter at that point. Sure. But if you don't put the domain name- If it's the fuzzy searches where you don't have a complete username, that's where you may not find them. And it depends on how many, how large your server is, how many, like that's just unclear. And that's where like the search features of Twitter are pretty powerful and Mastodon in terms of that, that aspect of search is a little bit trickier. You kind of need their whole handle to be guaranteed to find someone. Sure. I'm just trying to figure out who ends up in the pool of- I think what we're saying is we don't really know. Okay. They're both my hypothesis. I have theories, but I don't actually know. Okay. I feel like it's based on your followers, sort of like common, similar to how Facebook will recommend people to you based on who you're friends with and who they're friends with, sort of like a web or network. I'm wondering if it does something similar to that. Cause Jim, while you were sharing your screen and you typed my name and just Lauren, like if I search Lauren in my search bar, I have a very similar list that comes up. And I'm wondering if it's just because you and I follow each other and maybe follow similar people. But again, that's my very beginner theory. My- I think that's pretty close. I think that's my working theory too, basically, except that it also can include other folks on your server and who they follow. Yeah. If you didn't follow Lauren, but we're on the same server, then Lauren's pool would still include people that I follow. That's my theory. Okay. That's interesting to me. I put this in the chat. The thing that I really like about Mastodon and that I really hated about Twitter was the fact that I really liked the ability to say, you do not get to see the list or the number of people that follow me and who I follow. I just really didn't like that for privacy, for what it ended up doing of like, I have 20,000 followers. So I'm cooler than I thought that was stupid. But so if I turn that off, does that affect the pool or not? I don't think so. But you can do that regardless of whether your account is public or like the actual things you publish are public or private. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. That's it. I just want to turn that off. Do you, does anyone want to see inside the profile like some of the admin things you can do as an admin of a server? Like not that I'll take you through deeply, but like a couple of things that are cool is obviously you get notified and Downs is loving my Galaxian as everybody on Mastodon should love my Galaxian. But more than that, there's this edit profile, which actually as an admin, you really get to your point, Tyler, control stuff like automated post deletion. Remember the whole deletors on Twitter? There was a whole movement, like I'm deleting my tweets that are two weeks old because someone might read it and take it out of context. Well, that's built into Mastodon as is the import export as is something that we've been playing around with and is super cool. Let me find it. Oh, do I, I don't have it on DS1. On this account, but you can see it here on, which is I think the coolest thing about Mastodon is web hooks that allow you to bring in other applications like Azure Cast, the open source radio station. This is a web hook to let me know when someone goes on DS106 radio or reclaim radio right within the thing. And so like you have really for me the administration of different users, right? So you can see new users, active users, interactions, server settings. You get to see all of these are the kind of server pieces like the database and the sidekick piece. All of this is really a nice interface for administering and kind of managing a small server. And when I say small server, you can see this 39 users. And we have collected in the course of a month and change almost 30 gigs of data in terms of just media that have been collected as a result of those federated posts that come in with their images, with their video, with their collected stuff. It's super interesting to think about how to deal with the collection of all those federated kind of details. But I really love the fact that you can hook into other applications. Ed, when you told me that you could actually in Mastodon follow my PeerTube instance, I was like, that is awesome. And you demonstrated that. And for me, that's when the LIPO went off like my PeerTube can come in here. And I like that I don't have any followers here and that I basically am talking to a few people and discovering them as I go. And it's not like you said, pilot, about massive following. And I'm gonna sit on this pulpit and tell everybody what I think and everybody's gonna bow down to me because that's what Twitter became and it became boring. And I think this is actually exciting because there are people trying to figure it out. Like how do you crosscast between Twitter and Mastodon cleanly? How do you bring your posts? How do you use WordPress as a place where you can do all of your distributed federated stuff? Like, I think it's fun because it's a brave new world of sorts. And you have power in it, I feel. Yeah, I like what you're saying, Jim. And I appreciate that kind of being off of, like we're not, I don't know, worshiping one voice over the other and that sort of idea in this space. And I really like that. But I think one of the things that I appreciated about Twitter is I really could find and connect with others in this community. And like, for instance, like I'm on Catherine Conan's account right now, we follow each other and she has 630 followers. And I would love to see who those people are. And I guess that's maybe a user preference or maybe it's a Mastodon wide thing, but I can't see who she's following or who's following her. And before that used to be one of the ways that I would try to find new people to connect with and just see what the trends are around certain things. And so maybe I'm just thinking about the space wrong and it's not comparable to Twitter in that way. It's something else entirely. So I might just have to change the way that I'm thinking about it as a not a replacement. But go ahead. Here it is. Here's hide your social graph. So you have a choice to say, I don't want other people to be able to look at the followers kind of like Pilate was saying for like different reasons because follower count became a source of power. Does it still show the number? If you go to mine, I just turned that setting on. So if you go find mine, it'll show, it'll, it'll... It still shows the number. Yeah. I do think so. I like the user type of choice. I think that that's really cool. I guess I just, you know, the findability is something that I'm still struggling with, but I said that in the beginning anyway. Someone else can... But it is, I think a tricky thing. Cause I will say Lauren, like that's what I got the most value out of Twitter for too is it was pretty easy to find people. And in Macedonia, it's not as easy just by the definition of how it works. And I don't want it to work in a more centralized way personally. So, you know, like it's just different. It's been a little bit hard for me to kind of come to terms with how that works for me and against me, I guess, if that makes sense. Not me personally, but you know, anyway. But yeah, I will say you can, if that setting is not, the social graph thing is not turned off, you can go to a thing and click on the following and see who people are following. But it will say, depending on the account, it'll say, hey, you can only look at this if they're, and I can share my screen here. It'll give you a little warning that says you have to visit their profile on the server that they are hosted on, like their own instance. So if I go here and like, let's try this account and I go to following, it's gonna say, follows from this server are not displayed, browse more on the original, from other servers are not displayed. And then you can click that and it'll go to their profile on thispersonsonmaskdown.social and then I can click on it and there we go. So it's a little weird, but it is possible to do. I think the activity pub stuff is really interesting to me, too, but I've always heard people describe it as like kind of like RSS, but for the, you know, maybe a more flexible offers more different types of capability. And then the big one is it's bi-directional, right? You can not just read, but you can also use multiple things to post. There's all kinds of stuff that does this. And that's, I think really interesting, but like I said, it's one of those things that I'm still kind of waiting to see like what the conventions are gonna be as these things get more popular, like activity pub is not new. You know, there's been folks in the indie web space and tools that have been using that for a while. But I think what is new or is starting to be new is sort of like this Macedon and other Fediverse tools just getting more public interest all of a sudden. And I'm hoping that this results in a lot more clean integrations of activity pub between different things. I've read that like Matt Mullenwig from Automatic has said that Tumblr, they own Tumblr as well as wordpress.com, that they wanna put activity pub into Tumblr, which is really interesting. I read that and I was like, cool, they should put that right in WordPress. That's, I'd be like, there are ways to use activity pub and WordPress right now with plugins, but I would love to see like an official support like, you know, like Pingbacks, like are built in. Yeah, and they, you know, Automatic invested some significant money in that already. Like they posted out and said, are there any teams from Twitter that just got laid off that we could hire and hired some groups of people as a team to try to invest in that to see if they could capitalize on this moment, who knows what that's gonna lead to, but it seems like they're trying. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, it's interesting to see that. The other thing I'm, you know, I've been messing with the WordPress plugin and I know that was, that came up and I put it, it's already getting buried a little bit but I put in the chat a article that I shared on Mastodon at about 1233 and when I uploaded that and then shared an article that I'd written on my blog and people replied to my toot, it brought them in because it was activity pub in as comments, all the activity that happened on Mastodon came in as comments to my WordPress site because I had been playing with those things. And I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, I think that's really awesome. I think, and like I said, like that's clearly, but that's a lot of significant integration and work that, you know, of that plugin in this case to make that happen. And I'm just really interested to see like, if Mastodon and tools like Mastodon and activity pub and Fediverse, if this stuff takes off enough, where else are we gonna see this integrated in meaningful ways, it would be really interesting to see, you know, like we've mentioned PeerTube, but like, okay, what about PeerTube comments, you know, and all kinds of things like that, that can break out of the actual application that they're designed in, do cross applications of, so interesting, but how do we make that a relatable and understandable thing for people to use, even if it does work, it's not trivial to explain these sort of weird and complicated concepts for people that haven't encountered them. So add or, I'm sorry, one second, add or Tim or whoever, what plugin did you use to make the comments show up on your blog post? Activity pub. Activity, just that one, Tim just linked to? Okay. Yeah, the one that Tim just put in the... Yeah, thank you. I actually, related to that, is activity pub, is the thing that it's doing, making your blog its own separate mastodon profile, or is it pulling your posts in as toots? It is, it's, my blog is now like a mastodon endpoint. So pilot, if you go into your mastodon and you search for Becky J. at edbeck.com, it will show up like it's a mastodon account. Okay. You'll see my profile picture. I had to do some kind of indie web stuff to make that work. I had to make sure that my photo was on the webpage and I set up my H card properly so that it knew programmatically, oh, this picture is the profile picture. And so I had to do some things to make that work, but it looks like it's a mastodon account. Okay. I'm just wondering if there's a way, because it would probably be simple to do it with RSS, provided I did a little bit of digging, but the idea of in Twitter, I believe you could automate, I've put out a blog post, it gets pulled in as a tweet. To my... I think that already exists. I use an IAPT to do that. Yeah. I'm sure that that exists, but I'm wondering if it would, if there's a way to hook it up so that we've been talking about how replies in mastodon then get brought in as comments and whether that would be specific to, if I were to be pulling things in that way, whether that would bounce back or whether it's only bringing in my blog as its own separate. I think it's related to the URL pilot. For example, I was interacting as my mastodon account. And I was just in this conversation with some New Zealand OER folks. And so I brought it up. I said, oh, I wrote a blog post about this couple of years ago. Here's what I think. And it wasn't from my official, like beckyjadbeck.com user account. It was from my mastodon user account. When they replied to it, it was linked to it enough that comments came in. I didn't have to do much. Cool. Yeah. And that's activity pub enabling that to happen. The interesting thing about that pilot is like the, like you were saying that people do like automatic posting from Twitter or from blog posts to Twitter. The thing is Twitter is not doing that, right? Twitter is just the place that it ends up. They're using some software to do the cross posting, right? If IFTT, Zapier, there's all kinds of things, right? You need some middleware though. Maybe it's a WordPress plugin that's doing it directly. But you need something to do that. And the kind of interesting thing about activity pub was in many cases, if both ends support it, you don't need that middle thing. So like in this instance, it's sort of mastodon talking to the activity pub plugin. And I think it'd be even cooler if that was, if this got popular enough, if automatic saw it or the wordpress.org community saw it that they wanted to build that in the WordPress and it was just part and there was no plugin needed. I don't know that it would ever get there. Who knows, right? But that I think could be kind of amazing for revitalizing like blog comments and things like that. Like for folks that haven't encountered that in the same way and to kind of tie these worlds together and do it in a way where it happens and you don't have to do much to make it happen would be so interesting. Yeah. You know, and maybe it's just a button you turn on, right? You say like, allow blog comments or also allow comments from the Fediverse or something like that. Tim, have you been messing around with that activity pub plugin? No, I've just been trying to sort of learn the ropes and go slow with shutting down Twitter and bringing up mastodon. So it's on my list of things to think about I'm also just maybe taking a little bit of a break from these things and seeing how I miss the sort of personal learning network aspect of it but a lot of things I think that are falling away right now are actually quite healthy for me and I'm trying to determine how much of this I want to pursue and how much I wanna just sort of close the book on it and maybe not if that makes any sense. I think that makes total sense. I missed out on Twitter. When Twitter started, I was still teaching high school and that's where all the high schoolers were so I actively avoided being on Twitter. And then I remember, Lauren, when you came to Onianta, you were like, hey, can you give me your Twitter handle and I can tweet about coming to Onianta and I was like, I'll give it to you but it'll just be embarrassing for both of us. You know, like... It's funny. It's been set up since 2007. I have two tweets out. No followers, I'm not following anyone. It's kind of interesting. Like for me, I've never been huge into Twitter but like it, I think Twitter was something I used a lot in college with friends and then by the time I graduated college, then it eventually became my learning network and so that was kind of weird. I had like two little uses for Twitter but I've never been like, I've never been someone who tweets a lot. I'm mostly just reading and following things. But for that, I feel more comfortable to be sort of myself on Mastodon kind of like I did when early days for me on Twitter just because it's smaller. And it's interesting. I see people saying like, oh, people just like Mastodon because it's smaller. And I'm like, yeah. I don't really know if that's a problem. It's not a problem for me. I can see some of the things that they're saying is like, okay, well, what about if it becomes big and there's moderation issues and I get all of that. Like those are things to think about but I have to say like, I really just kind of like that it's a smaller place and I'm more encouraged. Like I am a Mastodon completionist in terms of the follow, I don't follow that many people but I often see everything that was like posted to Mastodon in a day of the people that I follow. That's really cool. I don't do that with Twitter and basically haven't since 2012, you know? And I know I could have, that's my fault, right? I could just unfollow a bunch of people on Twitter and then made that experience for myself except with algorithmic stuff I get like a bunch of garbage in there anyway, but, you know. Yeah, I've seen, I anticipate two problems and they're kind of opposite of each other. Twitter was really good at re-engaging people because it would choose something from an algorithm and say, hey, you haven't been on Twitter yet, you know, you haven't been on Twitter for a while, check out this post that's gaining traction, you know, check out this person that has a lot of followers. So that must mean that what they say is important and come back and engage with that post. Mastodon isn't gonna reach out and hit you and say, come back. And I've seen a lot of educational communities die or atrophy when they aren't getting those re-engagement reminders. And those can either be kind of manual, hey, we're sending out a monthly email or they can be kind of, you know, created by an algorithm. Hey, this person that you've engaged with in the past has posted, do you wanna see that? You know, but Mastodon isn't gonna do that, they're anti-algorithm. Then I also, the flip side of that is I also see people who want to be on Mastodon because it aligns with their values of open, but they have benefited so much from the algorithms of Twitter that they can't really get themselves free of Twitter. I'm thinking of someone in the open community, I won't say their name, but like they actually changed their name to blank is on Mastodon, but they keep going back to Twitter because they get so much more reach there and they get so many more likes and reposts there, but they don't get that same feeling from Mastodon. So it's like that drug they're always going back to and it's like, oh, you really wanna be, you really wanna be into Mastodon, but you really love the algorithm that promotes your post and sends me an email when you post that you get from Twitter. Yeah, but in some ways, that's a marketing tool for them, right? It's not really the same use cases, me and you, right? And I understand the challenge there, but I'm maybe not that sympathetic to it. I'm kind of like, okay, that's not my problem, you know? And not that I would say that makes it not a problem for someone, but I'm just saying like, it's tricky and it's kind of related like there was an interesting, I saw some stuff on Mastodon of like, okay, what about like higher ed presences in the Fediverse and what is that gonna look like or will ever, you know, who knows? And like, would a college or university have an official account? What would that look like? Would they host it themselves or pay for a host? Or would they join one of the like large instances? Like why, what would they do? And I think, you know, there's a very real, there's folks saying like, well, you know, reach would be more difficult and, you know, yeah, it probably would be. It's relevant constantly. Yeah. I think- You're not gonna get promoted because you have a lot of followers. I think the thing- Because Twitter's algorithm, if you had, you know, 100,000 alumni that followed your institutional account, they would say, ah, this count must be important. So when this account, you know, tweets something out, I should, you know, buzz some people and let them know or promote that tweet higher in the algorithm, the college and universities will not like Mastodon. Yeah, but I think a lot of what made Twitter what it is happened before they were doing a lot of that stuff, right? Now, I guess it depends on what you mean by what it is, but like, I think about like the, you're talking about the re-engagement stuff and like when I found Twitter most useful, it didn't do that, right? Like not at that time. And I don't know what to think about that because on the one level, it's like, okay, maybe that's a good thing. On the other hand, it's like, maybe I'm beyond checking in on this, right? Like I've never been one to have Twitter open all day. So like the re-engagement stuff definitely gets me into things more often, but I personally don't actually want that, you know? So it's complicated, but there are people who will want that. And there are of course also people who do have Twitter or Mastodon or whatever open all the time. And it's complicated, but I do think the, I'm really also, it's super cool to see like Jim, you're showing like the web hooks and how by the very nature of what Mastodon is and the federated, the federation aspects, it's also gonna embrace APIs and stuff. It makes sense that it would. And that's one of the things that like has also been kind of cool for me to see is how clean and simple it is to use that stuff in Mastodon and Twitter for business reasons has had to just clamp down on that continuously over time. And I think it's just gonna get worse. It's really encouraging to see that aspect get brought back to like, I think we're, I saw like we were talking about that and it was, I said, it's like, it's like web 2.0 again in some ways for me anyway. The- Chris, I feel like this is your moment. Yeah. The thing that you've been talking about for 10 years, you know, is possible. Well, pieces of it are, there are things about Mastodon and what they're doing and how it's built that make webby stuff incredibly hard. So all of the specs that Mastodon and most of the Fediverse are built on are 15 plus years old. They're really crafty. They're not minimal examples of what you need to do to communicate on the web, which makes it very hard. If you're a developer starting from scratch, there you have a humongous amount of reading to do. You can't just take a little bit of HTML, a little bit of CSS and maybe a sprinkling of JavaScript. You have to go do some super heavy lifting to build activity pub or activity streams type of infrastructure, which is major pain. And there's a reason not a lot of people are doing it. I suspect a few more will get into it. But when Matt Molenweg says, we're gonna do this for Tumblr, my expectation that that actually happens is maybe 5% right now. I really think a year from now we'll be sitting and looking at Tumblr and Tumblr is still gonna be Tumblr exactly as it is today. And it's not gonna move an inch. The other kind of underlying issue is what happens when Google next week decides we're all in on activity pub? We're gonna do this, Fediverse all the way. Suddenly, and what's unwritten in a lot of this is Mastodon is such a huge player in this space that a lot of the standards that run the Fediverse are standards because Mastodon says they are right now. If they change tomorrow and use something else, if you don't follow them, you're stuck. So if you're pixel fed or bookworm, which is kind of a version for, you know, it's a good reads replacement that runs on activity pub. If you're one of those other players, suddenly you're screwed. Or if Google or, you know, Microsoft get into it or Amazon let's say decides, oh, we're gonna do this and we're gonna create a thing. Those 900 pound gorillas can cause some serious havoc because it's standardized, but it's not really standardized. So you'll see, you know, some things like that. Now there are some people like Darius Kazemi who are playing around with things like hometown, which I think is super cool. And he's adding kind of other layers of security or things like, you know, local posting only. So if you have a class you could have or you're a university and you wanna have a university or an apartment wide account, you can set up local only posting with that. So there's only internal communication. And unless you screenshot it or copy paste it, it won't get out. So you can kind of create some semblance of privacy for students, although maybe not full FERPA, you know, yet. Doing that on the web is incredibly hard obviously, but you could get at least a reasonable amount of, here's a small private conversation, but if you wanna have larger conversations with the rest of the world, you can change one setting when you make your post and that's possible. Can I ask you, Chris? But there's still a huge number of issues that, and nobody's talking about the issues that still exist. It's, hey, we're happy that we're not in the talk successful of Twitter, but... Can I ask you something, Chris? I don't know if you can hear me. But I'd be super interested to know like the hometown fork of Mastodon, I've been following that because I think that's where Hum Commons is running, or H Commons. What was the logic behind that? Cause I think there were certain things that Mastodon wouldn't do it. So is that a place to start looking at some of those differences and different, like, cause, you know, WordPress was a fork of like B-Press or whatever it was early on. Like, are we looking at that moment where we're gonna start seeing the kind of Fediverse as people maybe move away from some of the centralized stuff, stuff to fork into different options? I think Kathleen and her groups choice to do hometown. And honestly, I'm kind of surprised they knew it existed as a thing. But the two things they, the one thing they really wanted was to be able to change a setting to go over the 500 character limit. So if you look at the internals of their system and there's a URL you can ping and it'll return what their system looks like. And I think their cap is a thousand words which has meant to create more conversation and kind of longer form posts. And if you follow people on there who are posting over 500 characters, they just get a little read more thing that you click on and go to the thing. And then the other thing they wanted was that local only posting as a kind of an additional layer of kind of privacy and protection so that you don't have all of the reply guy, you know, craziness. And if you wanna have a smaller local conversation a Darius uses it for himself because he's running. I think he lifted his cap. He had it capped at 500 people and I think it's now at a thousand because he's added more friends who've joined in the last two months. But he's doing it as a, this is kind of for me and friends and family and not really so much for the rest of the world. And I think a lot of the conversations that are on his instance, are local only and nowhere else. It's his friends and his family and him. But if you want the option to have just one instance and be able to talk to everyone else, that's there. Did they use similar modifications? Like truth social is a unfederated mastodon instance, right? Well, it's a federated mastodon instance. I think the broader FEDAverse has chosen to block it specifically. But they also got into trouble too because they didn't brand it as, they didn't follow any of the licensing and got into some trouble as a result. But it will be interesting to see people play those experiments. But right now everybody thinks the FEDAverse is mastodon and mastodon only. And they don't think about pixel FED or there's a bunch of blogging, there's a blogging platform called write.as, which is kind of a long form, blogging platform built on Activity Pub. And you can follow people's blogs through mastodon on there. You'll always get that read more thing. But I don't see, and apparently Hubsila will do it, but I don't see any platform that supports all of Activity Pub that allows you to do long form stuff, short posts, video, photos, the whole, nobody's, it's been six years now and no one has built a thing that does all of the things. And in part, it's because of that issue of the standards, not quite meeting. So you have to hit the standards mastodons doing, but you also have to hit the standards that every other tiny little piece of the FEDAverse is operating on. And it's not an inconsequential problem. The different versions of RSS back in the day. Adam, RSS two, RSS one, like when is the spec gonna meet and will it bring in all? I mean, obviously it's a bigger problem in some ways, but it's super interesting because it does harken back to some of that. Can I ask a very kind of like functional question? So just to wrap my head around. Oh, please, Chris, it looks like you wanna speak. I don't wanna stand in your way. Oh, no, I don't know what happened. I hit a button and I'm good. Okay. Well, we will always let you speak. So let me ask you this quickly. So I did during this meeting because this was an active meeting and I actively engaged and I actively did something. So one of the things, so thank you community. This activity pub is saying that my people can follow the username and let me put it up here. It's just gonna be the username I associate with my blog. Like here's an interesting connection issue. Maybe that links back to our conversation. So my blog is now using activity pub, another node, and that would be a username people would follow to see blog posts or would I just link that with my mastodon account? Like how does that link happen if that makes any sense? So what it's doing is it is using the standards that WordPress is built on in the forms and fields that are common to everyone and it is making your website look like it supports the activity pub protocol. But it's only doing about half of that. So it's using, and if you have multiple accounts on there, those multiple accounts are then followable or potentially findable. So if your username for your WordPress instance is admin, then that's gonna be the thing it uses. If you go into your user profile settings and change your profile name, that suddenly will switch and should propagate thereafter. But what it's doing is it's looking at a bunch of the common things, your username, your profile. If you have a profile picture set up somehow and it's able to, that plug-in is able to find those bits of data in your, where you would commonly hold them or keep them and use the profiles on your WordPress site. And it's able to then broadcast them to the Fediverse in a way that makes your website look like it's a standalone instance. But it's only the publishing part. So when you publish, others are able to subscribe to you from other, and not even just Mastodon, but if there are other interfaces that do that, let's say Pixel Fed or Bookworm, I could subscribe to you in those places as well and see this. What you're missing with this, what's not built in yet and I may never be, is the reader interface. So a lot of what people love about Mastodon is you've got a Twitter-like or a tweet-deck-like interface depending on whether you set that setting for the advanced setting. To be able to read what others are posting. And that is not built into this WordPress piece yet. I don't know that they ever will because that's another huge, that's a massive lift of following the specs. And then you've got to now store all that data from everywhere else for all the things you're following in your database somewhere, which is maybe a heavy lift thing for especially a shared hosted account to pull off unless you're gonna only pull in four or five days worth of data and then dump it automatically as you go. So I've been using feed readers or social readers to follow people and then I can read them and react and respond to them with all the rest of my infrastructure. But essentially that's what that activity plug plugin is doing. And then the webfinger piece, the webfinger plugin is actually, essentially putting a JSON file into your well-known dot well-known root path, which a lot of old school web stuff uses to identify who you are, your account, your name, where you can be found on the web. So essentially you can, the way Unix used to finger email addresses, you can finger web addresses, thus the name webfinger. So that adds that kind of identity piece for that. And then there's another one called- The node one. Node info two, which, and none of it's documented, I'm starting to scribble up some documentation for pieces of it. The, almost all of it was written by Matthias Feffler, who is a long time WordPress engineer. He works for one-in-one in Germany and has been doing this stuff in his free time. But he's built and written big chunks of most of the indie web infrastructure as well. So when new stuff comes out, he's like, okay, I'm just gonna support it and start writing code. So this stuff has been around for a couple of years. And the last time I'd looked about two weeks ago, there were over 800 WordPress sites that were using it and actively kind of playing around in the space. So my guess is as more and more people do it, they'll find the handful of bugs and squash them and it'll be much better, at least for the publishing side. Somebody's gonna have to do some heavy work to decide we're gonna support this on the consumer side. But I think it's probably solid enough that with a few tweaks, if WordPress.com wanted to put it into core or flip the switch next week, they could do that. And suddenly most of the web would suddenly support this or a big chunk of this spec. So I have what I think is a related question. I mentioned that I'm still just sort of learning the ropes on this, but I am curious about the profile metadata area of the Mastodon profile. And particularly because as Taylor mentioned earlier, spoofing another account in a federated situation is a rather easy thing to do and looking at the verification area of a Mastodon profile or using it in a similar way to those directory files for well-known as sort of like the place that points out to the other things that you're doing in your sort of digital identity. Has anybody looked into that much or set that up? And what are you choosing as the verification point to add that tag for Mastodon to get the sort of green verification area in your profile? And the nice thing about that is that is just using the rel link and you can do that with basically anything that gives you control over the HTML. So like my blog is a static site. So I just made a link there, but you can do it in WordPress, you can do it in pretty much anything. And that is pretty easy to do in lightweight. I threw mine in my WP content directory, but I was just curious what other folks thought and if there is a good practice for this, if there's someplace better than others to sort of do that. Since I'm not afraid of Gutenberg, I just did it right. I'm not afraid of Gutenberg. The curse of Gutenberg. I think what I typically see is people will put it on the homepage somewhere. And like in my site, I have like a little like, my blog on the site, I post on Macedon. I do this, I do this. And the link for post on Macedon is that link. So not only does that link link back to my Macedon, but it's also got the rel stuff in it too, so that I can have Macedon. The general setup for what it's doing is the only way you can, the rel me points from one webpage to another to say, essentially, here's another version of me on the web. And they used to do it. I think Twitter took it out about two years ago, but Twitter had built in rel me so that if you put your website name into their, here's my website field in your account, it automatically created a rel me link to your website. And then your website, because you control it and can put that rel me link on it, can point back. And the fact that the two things that you have to log in and be able to set those settings to make them point at each other becomes the indicator that, yes, in fact, I do own this thing. So it becomes a kind of an independent way of verifying one website to another. The common ways I've seen people do it, so a lot of people on their sidebar will have, here's my Facebook account, my Instagram account, my Twitter account, my mastodon account, and those links, when you click on them, go to those places. So a lot of people have been putting that rel me link onto those is a quick easy way to do it if you're using the old WordPress interface, the classic version, and it may have even started out as a Jetpack thing, but I think it's now in everything. There's a thing you can create essentially a menu of all those social things. And there's a custom button there you can click that says add classes. And if you just type the word me into that field, you'll get that ability. But a lot of people are just throwing in either a link in a sidebar or a widget, they're putting it in their footer. You could throw it anywhere on your page. Another, if you, I don't encourage it because it becomes hidden metadata that you forget is there, but you can use instead of an anchor link, you can use a link. So bracket link href equals your URL on mastodon and then add a class of rail equals me and that'll do it. And that'll create a hidden link that will verify you. But again, you may forget that hidden link is there five years from now and, you know. That's interesting. What you're saying, Chris, made me go back and say, and Tim, I was like, where did I add it? And I added it to my blog role. Like as a kind of hidden link, but still a realmie. So like I'm one of those weird people who still have a blog role and Baba social is in there as a link, which gave me the check mark. I haven't figured out how to do it in a peer tube yet, but it is a, it is an exercise where it can take longer. I know Martha bird is was like, it's not, it's not working. And it sometimes you have to redo it at Chris. I think you were part of that conversation. Like it does take a while. Yeah. The, the indie web plugin, the main thing that is kind of a, it's a clearinghouse to say, here's a bunch of other plugins that do other stuff, but the actual functionality that it provides is to give you an H card, which kind of is, you know, a business card online that's, that tells other computers, here's my name. Here's my profile picture. Here's my name. Here's my profile picture. Here's other places you can find me. So that, what that plugin does is it adds a few additional fields to your user profile, including one at the bottom that says, you know, other, other profiles in other places. I think WordPress has Twitter and Facebook and a few other common ones built in, but it adds some additional ones for mastodon or other accounts. So you can literally go in and I think it's a, I don't think it's comma separated, but it's all, each line is an account and I have a, so if I have four different mastodon locations, I can just put the URL to each of those identities in that box and that'll automatically do it. In fact, I think in that box, I have a couple of hundred social media account sites that do that. And my favorite thing for doing this is there's a social podcast bookmark service called huffduffer.com that I use to bookmark audio. And what it does is when I'm on a page, I can't listen to this NPR story right now. So I bookmark it with huffduffer and huffduffer scrapes the page, finds the MP3 file and creates essentially a custom podcast feed for what I wanna listen to. So I subscribe to it in my podcatcher and I get it all. But the fun thing that service does is when you give it your identity, your URL where you live online, it looks at your website and scrapes all the real me instances that it finds. And then it shows your kind of social, other socials in a list on its website. You don't have to, when you register, type your 50 other accounts in there, which is annoying and it's what happens on every social media site. But this one uses those web standards to find all the places you've already said you're a member of or part of or where you live in other places. And it just lists them for you automatically. And for me, that is just a super silly, simple thing that every social media service on the planet ought to do that because it's annoying, you join something new and then suddenly after, I'll give you a URL so you can look at the example and you'll see how many real me links I have on my site. When Chris was talking, when he was saying like that H card, I just used a Gutenberg editor to create a kind of manual H card because it just needs a div that's got a class H card on it. I had my name on my website already, I had my job title on my website already. I had links to my social media accounts already. It's all I had to do is kind of link those together. Yeah, I think that makes a lot more sense, sorry, Jim. No, no, Tim, I was just not gonna say anything important at all. And the H card for like strictly for your question, Tim, like you don't have to use H card to do like the mastodon green link thing, but H card is sort of the bigger kind of cooler. Well, it would be cool, but I think it would also make it a lot more difficult for folks to properly implement that, right? Cause now it's like a, I got to redesign parts of my page project and would it be good to do that for them potentially? But, you know, like for instance, I have realmie links on my site, I don't have an H card. I should do one. I've always wanted to do one. I literally have a little to-do list that I've had for years of like things I want my website to support from any web perspective that it just doesn't. And H card is probably the first thing I should do cause it wouldn't take that long. But, you know, those things are all part of sort of an ecosystem of this stuff, right? So. I'm just going to say one of the things that I am excited about right now. And Tim, I came just a little like anecdote, like I had no intention of doing a mastodon. I was like, I'm done kind of with Twitter. It's just like on life support. And I don't need another Twitter. And then Alan was like DS106, like we don't, we need a mastodon account or a server because we can't do it on these other servers. No one was, and so I was like, you know, he's asking, I'll try. I installed it and then I got to the interface and I was like, oh, this isn't bad. And then I was like, oh, I'm only following like 40 people and I'm posting pictures that I would have posted on Twitter or stuff like that. That's not, it's like, I like the, how would you say quotidian nature of some of that social media, like the DS106 radio, like that's where I, and this has kind of been that and add to it the cool thing of like bridging together all these weird RSSI technologies to make it work. And, you know, I didn't have the headspace for it before, but now that I saw that other people are there, which is always the draw for me and not everyone, which is kind of the drawback of Twitter, I got excited again. And who knows if it will last. I don't have the same investment because it's always the blog first, but I like being around other cool people thinking this stuff through. And there's a very low overhead to doing it. It's not like you have to post or it's not about attention. And even the people who are like, remember some of the master donors have been doing it for a while, like when all the Twitter people started coming in, they're like, they're ruining the party. Like they're all so loud. They all keep posting. It was very emo. The sundry and the herd problems. I do think for folks that even, you know, even when you're practicing what you preach and, you know, publishing the important, the good, the fun stuff to the blog first that you own and control, I do think it's natural and makes sense for some people, lots of people to have a need or want for a different maybe lower impact space. Like people create digital identities and think about them in limitless ways, right? And what I think of when I think, when I post a message on is it's sort of low effort. It isn't super representative of me as a professional all the time. Sometimes it is like, it's very different. My website is, that's the stuff I care about mostly goes there. I'm not going to say all of it is important and I care a lot about, but you know what I mean? Like I view those things as different and I have a reason for them to be in my life anyway for them both to exist. And for them to not really be the same thing. Like I don't, I definitely don't want all my Macedon posts on my blog. And I, I guess most of my blog posts could go on Macedon but you know, they're different things for me. You, the other thing people have done is you can create a kind of a separate space on your website that is not centered for all that chitchat stuff. So I know a bunch of people who they post all their Macedon stuff on their site, but they have it hidden is kind of a little micro blog thing off to the side. And if you're subscribed to their main RFS feed, they hide it all. So you don't see all the, the noise. So, you know, I've got, actually I had to do some heavy WordPress work this past year because my data, my WordPress database went over was it two gigabytes of text data, not even photos, but just pure text over two gigs of data. And it's because I have for the last like eight or nine years owned everything I post online on my website. So, you know, I've got, I think it's over like 50,000 plus posts on my set of like pieces of content. That's awesome. And only, I may be a third of it is even public. But if I'm searching for something, I can go to one place and search and find it. And to me, that is just, that saves half of my world. I don't have to think, oh, did I put that on a Macedon or Twitter or Facebook and then try and search for it there? I'm just, I have it. I mean, the search on a lot of those tools is crazy. Like going back to that. Two gig is a lot. I was gonna say we support some WordPress multisites here and a lot of the ones that I don't even approach that. Some of them are bigger, but that's a lot of text. Yeah, when I went to one-in-one, I was like, you know, I need a bigger database. Can you help me out? And they're like, well, what are you doing? And I'm like, well, I have this WordPress site. And they're like, you know, what kind of multisite thing is it, we can move you up like five tiers? And I'm like, no, it's just a small personal blog. And I really, I don't wanna pay 500 bucks a month to do this. I just wanna... Yeah, they were probably like, nope, not a small personal blog by our definition. But yeah, they're probably wondering what was wrong, right? They're probably like, there's something creating crazy entries and this guy doesn't even know that it's happening, you know? Yeah, no, that was the best thing. And I was like, you know, I've looked at it and it's all just... It's fine, yeah. That's when you reach, ripped out your indie web ad. And you're like, do you know, sir, that I created the indie web? No, I didn't come close to creating it, but I do some crazy stuff. It's fine. Well, I agree with Ed Beck. Your day has come, Chris. And I appreciate you not only joining us, but like you've been wonderful presence all over. I've seen you talking with Kathleen and other people who are getting into it. So as usual, you know, you're walking the walk and talking the talk, it's awesome. So thanks. I appreciate you coming in here and sharing us. I'm activity pub now, thanks to you. I, interestingly too, I had a... I had dinner last night with a friend who is a project manager at... I don't know, I always forget the name of... He works for essentially a company that doles out massive grant money, primarily in sciences and sometimes in the humanities. And he had actually seen Kathleen in DC at some conference yesterday. And then he's out here for a group. And essentially they have created a small, high-end group of funders who dole out massive, multiple millions of dollars to the sciences. And they help high-wealth individuals figure out how to donate money. So when Zuckerberg and Chan decided we wanna give money away to science, how do we do that? How do we build the infrastructure? They went to this group of people. But he said to me, he's like, I really want... And he's describing to me essentially a domain of one's own or indie web as a thing. And he knows I kind of dabble in it. But he's like, I wanna help fund groups. I need either... He's like, I can't write checks to individuals, but I can write hundreds of thousands of dollars of checks to millions, to groups who wanna play around in open spaces or do open. And in particular, he's interested in open science and how university labs can have better kind of website infrastructure on the web, both for themselves as well as for internal and external communications. I was like, well, I'll tip some friends off that you're doing that. Because I think what you guys are doing, or you could even pull in somebody like Cogdog or the broader network. And as long as he's got an institution that he can write a check to to pay for it, he would like to fund or they would like to fund open science initiatives that relate to open source and open web and domain of one's own in some sense. I don't know how we... I don't know if they would or wouldn't balk at for profits. But it would be interesting like if there was a group, and you link that to a sciences and whatever institutions, variety of them, like bring people to the table, but like a consortium where part of what they're doing is working on some of these open protocols you were talking about and making some of that stuff work and getting people interested in it. Like, I'd be super, oh, Sloan, absolutely. Yeah, that's like, they got money. Like even more, he knows like the five or 10 other people in those other spaces who have pockets. So when, if they pass for some reason, he's got other places to... Well, let's, I would, I mean, if you're gonna reach out to folks, let us know. I'd be very interested in seeing where that goes. I mean, when that science base where for profit I think it'd probably be better living in the higher ed stuff. But like, obviously I think if you can fund and get people excited, you can get these pockets like the indie web folks and stuff doing amazing things. That's what's exciting around seeing all these people get in there and starting to say, oh, we could do this. Oh, look at this, these two can connect. It's just interesting. The problem he's seeing and that he's got is most of the people who wanna work on these types of things or these types of problems, a lot of them are in academia or they're people who work for big corporations and have full time day jobs that don't allow them that fungibility of other outside work. So you almost need somebody who's got a solid enough consulting business that they can kind of leave off a piece of it and go work on some separately funded project or somebody in academia who has some free time to. And Alan would immediately come to mind for sure. He was one of the first, I was like, okay, there's that. But I think this kind of network of people who we are and what we want is the same thing that he wants, he just, he has bagfuls of money that he can put in a lab. Interesting to look at like what CUNY did with Open Lab too. Yes, exactly. And see like, is there an institution that feels particularly strongly that they can hire folks and they need funding to do all that work? He's mentioned to me too as an example, one of the first things that he funded in 2011 was the libraries or library carpentry and it was John Udell told him about somebody he ought to meet to build this thing. So it's that kind of, they'd prefer to do it with small groups who have some infrastructure and who need funding to get things moving, but to have created something like the library carpentries as a project that then spins out and runs for years or I'm trying to think of another, and he started out at George Mason and got his PhD there and was one of the guys who worked on Zotero. So those are the things that Josh Greenberg. Okay, so I remember the Zotero crew. Yeah. So he, I think he went to the New York Public Library and did digital for them for a couple of years and then went to Sloan and he's been there for more than a decade, I think. I think it's, look, it's good. I mean, obviously Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the work they're doing at MSU is amazing. I love that they pushed on this, but if you need ideas for people, I'll send them. Like people who I know, there's a guy who does amazing, you probably know Boone Gorgeous. He's another one who's a developer who would be like someone who can get some of that stuff. The thing is, is I've always been kind of aligned more with the humanities. So I don't know some of the social science. The science is so well, I've worked with some pieces, but I'm almost limited there. The problems are all the same. He's just viewing it more from a science perspective than others might. And in fact, I told him, I was like, you should go tell Kathleen to put in for some money because they're doing what you're talking about within the humanities already. Yeah, exactly. And it's the same problem, it's just what sub-problems are you working on after that? So. It's interesting, a lot of this stuff, I think that I feel like talking with like in higher ed, talking with faculty, folks involved in humanities get the ownership stuff right away, or not right away, but in a lot of cases right away in ways that it makes sense because of what they study and they think a lot about authorship and that kind of thing. And to kind of have something that can maybe bring some of that cool work that's into this, the more like the STEM community is really probably worthwhile. But all right, I think we probably should wrap it up we're half an hour over. We have a lot of horror. But it was great talking with everyone who's here and thanks for everyone who stopped in. Before you jump though, you gotta do like a half a second of PR for tomorrow. Is that you just gonna sit down and actually build a thing? Oh, for tomorrow? Well, we got a couple of things going on tomorrow. The press books thing I've been particular I was interested in. Yeah, so a couple of things. One thing I was gonna mention today that I didn't mention at all is we have a Mastodon installer and Reclaim Cloud as of today. So that just came out. So... All this and you forgot that part? Well, I mean... There is the lead. Yeah, we'll announce it, but it's a one-click installer. And the reason I don't wanna, a did bury the lead is it's not documented yet. So folks will have to use it and then they have to go edit a config file to set up mail and stuff like that. I mean, it does tell them this but we don't have a nice document for it yet. But that's the thing. And then tomorrow we got two things. So we have an Open Media Ecosystem Flex Course. It's currently in its second week. We're gonna be talking about JITSEE, which is the tool we're talking on right now actually, and setting it up and showing what that's like. That's happening at what time is that air? That happens at 11 a.m. Eastern. And then at one Eastern, Amanda and I are gonna be messing around with press books. This is actually a follow-up. We set up press books in Reclaim Cloud. Just the bare bones, like we set up WordPress, change the version it's running, change the PHP version, got the multi-site setup, and then the plugins for press books. Now we're gonna be dealing with the dependencies because press books has dependencies that you need to install on the server to do PDFs and in EPUB validation and XML import, things like that. Some of it, we know it will work. Some of it, we haven't tried yet. So it's gonna be a little bit freewheeling and we may not completely get all of it working, to be perfectly honest. And that's moving towards a one-click install as well? We'll see. It would be great to have a one-click install. The tricky thing with press books is they don't currently have documented super well what versions of all the things you need. So they don't actually have on their website what version of WordPress they support. They have it. They say the most recent version of WordPress usually is what they say. So it's a little tricky for me because I'm like, I can't build an installer to that. But I would say, I think there's a world where we could get it documented well enough that maybe it's not a one-click installer, but it's a, hey, click this button and you'll get WordPress. Now run these six commands and you can literally copy paste them and now you've got press books. I think that's possible. So that's what we're gonna see tomorrow is how much of that dependencies we can get set up going. Yeah, for me, I really want it and the cost of having press books or paying someone else to do it for me as an individual is higher than I want it to be. And it's sadly, it's not just a quick shared hosting. Yeah. Simple thing. And I really wish it were because if it were, I would have it tomorrow without the eight million dependencies. I just don't have the admin tax time to spend on doing it as a thing. Yeah, and I think the cloud can be a pretty decent middle ground, right? Because you can host it in our cloud and it's not gonna be as cheap as shared hosting. Just not a thing. That's the great thing about shared hosting is how cheap it can be. But it also isn't, you're not paying $100 a month either. You're probably talking between 10 and 20 bucks a month, which is not nothing, but certainly cheaper. But yeah, and because you can get all those dependencies can work, like I said, some of them are a little tricky because I'm kind of fighting with press books as documentation at this point because some of it needs updating a lot. But it's possible to get it working because you have access to install stuff on that environment in the way you can't with shared. So I think it's a pretty good middle ground for it. And yeah, hopefully we can, we're using the streams to kind of document our process and then hopefully circle back on it and say, here are our recommendations and here's what you do is so that people don't have to watch three hours of me fumbling with it, but yeah. Well, that's always fine too. Or if they watch you fumble with it, they may be able to, you know, help you kind of rubber duck debug it in some sense. Well, and I'm kind of hoping that if someone is interested, they can kind of see our process and kind of maybe learn something if they want to, you know, that this is, there's dual purpose for us, you know, maybe they can learn something about how the cloud works and ticks, even if we're not completely successful tomorrow, that we'll certainly get some of it working. So, all right, I think that's time. You're masked it on one click. I probably want to play around with it over the holiday, so I'm glad it exists before the holidays hit. But I'm curious what, if you were doing a small single user instance, what is the cost of that on a per month? And I don't know if you've done a beat of like our small DS106 cost post yet. Yeah, so that is, I can give some basic recommendations, but I'm not even gonna give a dollar amount because there's a couple of things there. So the media, the storage needs for media is not insignificant. So for a single user, you could do it all in Reclaim Cloud, but if you're doing any more than a single user, you'd probably want to set up S3 for storage. Jim has a blog post on setting that up. My installer will make that pretty easy from the mastodon end to do, but you would want to do that. And then you're dealing with whatever cost that is. And the reason that's so significant is not just your post, but when it pulls in your timeline, it has a cash all that, right? So that's one thing. Now, mastodon itself though, if you're doing a single user and is relatively low traffic, I'm seeing between eight and 12 cloudlets, which if you go into Reclaim Cloud and just use its little interface, eight cloudlets is like 20 bucks a month. So it's, you know, not, again, it's not shared hosting, right? So, but it is kind of a significant application just at idle, just because it does a lot of, I think it has a lot to do with the activity pub and it's got a service called Sidekick that does all of the asynchronous stuff. And that thing will just use whatever RAM it wants. Yeah, that's the problem. Or things like mastodon.technology shut down last week and they're still sending out delete notices. They're trying to be responsible, but like they're sending out millions and millions of notices all across the Fediverse for this knucklehead thing that most instances don't care about and they would just drop the data. Well, and that's the tricky thing, right? Is mastodon is just, like this is what we've been talking about. Like it's cool, but it's not, it's not small. It just isn't. Like it's not designed from a technology perspective to be that way. And so my one click installer, like you could use it for a single person, but I don't know that most people will want to. I think I'm putting it out there so people can play with it, see what it's like to admin and then maybe they wanna run a small instance. And I think that could make some sense because the thing is it scales in that small to medium instance size pretty well. Like I would be willing to bet that, I mean, I could look, but I don't wanna mess with it right now, but the DS106 instance, which only has like 50-ish people on it, probably doesn't cost much more than a one-person instance at the moment, right? Because most of the time it's just idle and handling in, most of the time it's just listening for people's timelines basically. I think most of the handful of hosts that do that or have been doing that have locked themselves down for the last three weeks. And they've got a queue and they're letting people in slowly, but so many people wanna run and host their own stuff, they've all shut down. So I would recommend you don't broadcast it widely or you may be inundated with so many people that you may actually have trouble scaling it yourselves. But I also know there's people like Anil Dash, who wants to or is willing to tinker and wants his own instance, but he knows it's also gonna be, if he joins a public instance, he may bring it down instantaneously just because he's as big a name as he is in that space. I think I'm following, he's on what some instance, I'm pretty sure I'm following that right now. Yeah, he's on one master on dot cloud, I think. Okay. That's a pretty good one. They've been doing some hinky things and he wants to leave it because some instances are starting to de-federate them for choices that they have made. Gotcha. So he's gonna go somewhere and either he wants to go somewhere that's big enough that they can handle it or he can tell them in advance and say, here's a couple of hundred bucks to like de-fray the cost, but be ready for the infrastructure when I join because it's gonna be a massive, it'll take your servers down kind of today. Sure. Or where can I go that I can set up my own and just do it, although he doesn't want the admin tax of doing it. He wants to. Yeah. Well, and that's the important distinction that I wanna make too when we document this installer is like, look, this doesn't get you out of sysadmin. It gets you out of the eight hours of getting it set up sysadmin. It will be working. And then from there, you still gotta pay attention when upgrades happen and you have to know to run this command to do upgrades. Now it's all in Docker, so like it's not actually that hard to manage upgrades, but it's not nothing, you know. You've got work to do, I'll let you go. All right. Well, I'll see you tomorrow for press posts. Cool. Sounds good. Thanks, David.