Connecting to the fediverse

Most social networks are built to keep you on the platform. That's the business model. The algorithm decides what you see, the company decides what you can say, and your followers, your history, your identity: all of it exists at the pleasure of people whose incentives and yours don't particularly line up.

The fediverse is a loose collection of social platforms (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others) that all speak the same open protocol: ActivityPub. The protocol is a W3C standard, like HTML. No one owns it, no one controls it, and if your particular server shuts down you move to another and your followers come with you.

More interestingly: you don't have to join any of these platforms. You can be the platform.

That's what I've done with this blog. radomski.co.nz is now an ActivityPub actor. Anyone on Mastodon, or Misskey, or any other fediverse platform can search for @Pat@radomski.co.nz and follow it directly. When I publish a post, it goes out to everyone who follows that handle, straight to their timeline, on whatever server they use. No intermediary, no algorithm deciding whether it's worth showing to anyone.

There's no engagement optimisation here. No one deciding this post deserves more reach than that one because it performed better in the first hour. A post goes out and people either see it or they don't. That's the whole mechanism.

It's a bit like having a radio frequency. You broadcast, and people tune in if they want to. Or they don't. Either way, you put something out and it exists, which is kind of the point.

This is how the internet used to feel. RSS, personal blogs, posting into the void with no clear sense of who was reading. The act of publishing was the act — not the numbers, not the reach, not whether the algorithm rewarded it. You wrote something and you put it there, and that was enough.

The fediverse has a bit of that energy. Can You Beat Wellington? is on it now too, as @CanYouBeat@canyoubeatwellington.radomski.co.nz. A small specific signal: broadcast when Wellington has a genuinely beautiful day, caught by whoever happens to be tuned in.

If you're on the fediverse, search for either handle. New posts will show up in your timeline as they're published. If you're not on the fediverse yet, mastodon.nz is a good place to start. New Zealand-based, been around since before Twitter began its long unravelling. Takes about five minutes.

RSS and email work too — all the options are on the follow page.

Either way, I'll keep putting things out there.