Toward Federated Microblogging

Microblogging is a term coined, I believe, in the Tumblr days, before Twitter as we know it, but it basically refers to what we now think of as Twitter. Short messages, a few sentences at most, and maybe a few photos.

For my purposes, it's just a way to share with friends and family a few photos as a way of saying "Here's a thing we did recently." without needing to write an entire blog post about it.

This blog that you're reading right now is running Ghost, a lightweight, simple piece of software that does just what I need. Where Wordpress has become a behemoth that can do everything, Ghost is still just focused on being a decent blog. It's small enough that it runs just fine on Digital Ocean's cheapest $5/month VM.

Surely, I thought, there must be something similar in the microblogging space. I don't mind hosting it myself, but as time goes on I've lost interest in Facebook and Twitter as long-term options, just because they make you scroll back through your chronological feed to find old entries. They seem like they want you focused on producing new content that they can use to attract your friends eyeballs so they can sell those friends' eyeballs to advertisers. Nothing wrong with that, but not what I want.

Running this blog each month costs me less than half what I pay for Netflix, which seems like a good value to me.

So, I thought, on that same VM which at the time of this writing has a load average of 0.00, 0.00, 0.00, surely I could run a small microblogging platform. Anyone that subscribes to this blog via RSS could subscribe to that too, and see the odd photo of whatever I was up to, if they were interested. No likes, no comments, no arguments.

Mastodon seemed like a logical choice. The simplest possible summary is that it's a federated microblogging platform. It's basically Twitter, except that anyone can set up their own node and have it connect to the other Mastodon nodes on the web. Instead of having one namespace of all Twitter users where I'm @bnbrry, instead, I would be @ben@benb.us. I'd be the only user at this node, but if someone wanted to tag me or retoot me or whatever, they could.

But the most important feature would be the RSS feed. Twitter and Facebook don't want to give you an RSS feed. They want you to come to their page, where they can show you an algorithmic newsfeed to get the most engagement and keep you on the page longer to keep looking at ads. Which, fair enough. They have shareholders to pay. But that's just not the incentive structure I'm all that interested in participating in.

If someone wants to bookmark my blog, great. If you want to throw it into Feedly, I'd really recommend that instead. So setting up a Mastodon instance is less about connecting to other Mastodon users (and yes, I know, anyone else in the fediverse, who I'm not all that interested in either). It's just a way to have an outlet for short messages.

I spent some time on my day off the day before Christmas setting up Mastodon, and while it looks like it might work, it's awfully over-engineered.

People talk about self-hosting Mastodon, but it's really meant to be heavy-duty. It's meant to be something that can have tens of thousands of users. The reports from other people trying a similar setup is that you need a beefy VM just to compile the dependencies and get it running.

Maybe it scales down fine, but honestly I didn't want to risk screwing up this VM that's done a fine job quietly hosting this blog for months and months. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future. The UI once it's running sure seems like it's nice.

And the idea of people running their own microblogs, the same way they own their Wordpress or Ghost blogs makes a lot of sense. I really think we're going to look back on the effects of the algorithmic newsfeed game we've all been playing for a decade and see we're less informed and more volatile for it.