Digital Inertia

I've been prevaricating recently with my indieWeb workflow. Here I talk through my current setup, options that I have been considering, the latest update to (link:https://maurice-renck.de/en/kirby/indieconnector/releases/v2-11-0 text:indieConnector), and why I will probably end up changing (almost) nothing at all.

My website is currently hosted with Krystal in the UK, built using Kirby CMS. I use Mastodon (predominantly) and Bluesky (for Burnley FC) for social media. My website is connected to both of these using Maurice Renck's excellent indieConnector plugin, and I use his Komments plugin to display webmentions and responses directly on the relevant articles.

I find the timelines in Mastodon and Bluesky overwhelmingly busy though, much preferring the quiet retoot free experience in micro.blog. However, I have always found the limited webmention capability in micro.blog restrictive.

I have recently bought a new url to hang my email and social media profiles off. In my ideal though, everything would be in one place - website, activity pub profile and timeline. Micro.blog can do that, albeit while only showing some of the interactions with you and your content, but also restricting content configurations through limiting the use of Hugo's yaml front matter. I have built dedicated content types and data structures in my Kirby build that it would be a shame to lose.

Known also does this, though its user base seems to be dwindling, and I'm not sure how supported that will be into the future, I'm yet to work out how to get it running either.

I looked at Ghost, but the format felt great for articles, but unsuitable for micro blogging.

I considered the Wordpress activityPub implementation too, getting as far as a test drive last night - but I remembered how much I hated the UI.

I even tried to get on with bearBlog, which I think is a great system, but the simplicity of writing was lost baking concepts like microformats into posts, that should just be built into the template itself.

Having burned off all of that energy, I'll probably stay with the same website setup that I have now. I'll likely move my mastodon presence over to a self hosted server shortly, and I may even 'bounce' my bluesky profile into it for simplicity. If I remember properly Tapbots' Ivory application allowed you to hide retoots from the timeline, so I'll give that a spin too. Ideally I would spin up a GoToSocial instance instead, though I'm not sure that the indieconnector direct post mechanism can be made to work with GTS, and probably enough prevarication already!

So finally, IndieConnector 2.11.0 was released today, which contains a couple of improvements that I had suggested. Images will now be uploaded with alt text carried through for screen reader users, and hopefully tags should be posted using the tags field from Kirby. Additionally the Mastodon post length issue that I had only just decided was an issue is reported to have been fixed. Hopefully by the time anybody reads this really long way of saying 'no change' all of that will have worked, streamlining this workflow greatly. If you did make it this far, congratulations, and commiserations... at least you do not actually have to live with my brain!

Until the next time....