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WriteOn: Into the Fediverse [1]

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Date: 2023-04-27  

Welcome to WriteOn!, where every Thursday, we discuss writing in its many forms — and the resources and advice to support it.

With Twitter doing a pretty good job of imploding, or at least becoming harder to sift through, attention is turning to alternative social media networks and publicity approaches. And, more importantly, places for communities with shared interests to gather.

I’ll skip the other alternative sites for “reasons” and focus on what I’ve gotten out of the Fediverse, for which the most frequent interface is Mastodon. There have been several introductory posts on DailyKos already, so I’ll skip the “what is the Fediverse” discussion and jump to the “pick a server” issue that often tangles people up — and how it gives different views into the community. And how to have a better experience for your preferred use of social media.

Different servers have different user bases, and some are set up to serve specific communities. For instance, dice.camp is a Role-Playing Game (largely Table-Top RPGs, or TTRPGs) community. Browsing their Explore tab will show more RPG content than other servers, and scrolling down the Local timeline will show a chronological order of local posts. It’s a good sized community, and there are a few higher volume posters, but for nerds of a certain bent, it’s a great source of RPG designers and players, miniature painting, artists, cartographers, etc. to follow. And you don’t even need an account on dice.camp to look at either timeline.

Three specific purpose servers crop up frequently for me as havens for writers, writing.exchange, wandering.shop, and romancelandia.club. Each one has an interesting Local timeline. (There are others, too.)

But the real power is in hashtags. They’re the primary search mechanism, and they’ll surface posts tagged with that hashtag that appear on that specific server (not necessarily local). So if you know you want to see an interesting place to look, try something like #AmWriting on writing.exchange to find conversations, tips, and people to follow. Then try it on romancelandia.club, and get a potentially different mix (though there will be a lot of overlap).

Hashtags and timelines are heavily populated streams on a larger server (such as the general purpose mstdn.social, mastodon.social, universeodon.social, newsie.social, etc.), but they’re a starting point for both interesting posts and interesting people to follow.

It’s also very important to note that you can follow a hashtag (though hashtag follows can’t currently be put in your lists), which means you can populate your personal (“Home”) timeline with the hashtag content in addition to accounts you follow. Very valuable for a carefully curated, personal experience.

And, of course, you’ll find some known authors already there.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/27/2166263/-WriteOn-Into-the-Fediverse

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