We've started both a Mastodon and a Diaspora, mostly for crosspost testing, and having a backup for contacting @#SpaceHost Help should this instance go down.

That said, as the newest toot on @Taurnsndhaus Admin says, I'll be using that one for St Louis related toots, maybe unique to there, maybe boosting stuff from here. No political stuff unless its really funny, or #STL related. We'll also be posting any STL or #missouri based recalls there as well.

@Taursndhaus Admin 's use is uncertain at this time, testing purposes definitely, beyond that, unsure. I might post (toot?) my Tumblr favorites over there too, that's what pushed me to set up these accounts, I my send them there and re-share them here, we'll see. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I'm going to use that. Heck, I set that one up as my old #diaspora on rageoss vanished, actually the whole pod seems to have. Activity on that one is obviously uncertain as Diaspora's lack of #ActivityPub limits the reach, if it had that, I'd prolly be running Diaspora instead of #friendica

So what started all of this?
It was brought to my attention that although my Tumblr posts were showing up fine on my end, albeit with some work as some posts wouldn't show a thumbnail or a link from the blog I found the post on, requiring me to find a re-share that would work, there were problems with sharing those posts. Mastodon shows nothing but a link, but that's the same whether its coming from here or directly from Tumblr; Diaspora however could show them fine when direct posted there, but when crossposted from here, all they see is a link. Clearly Tumblr is somehow breaking sharing from here as regular news articles, boosts, and any original posts here share fine, but none of Tumblr's posts do. Somehow I'm not surprised, I mean Tumblr offers an RSS feed, and I can follow feeds here just like I do any member of the #Fediverse , but their feeds are flaky at best, sometimes they won't work at all, giving me no way to follow them, other times posts lag and/or show up in clumps.

But any how, there's the whats and whys of where else I can be found.

Seeing this across all the accounts here, new followers no longer show up in the notifications on my browser.
I don't think I've changed any settings, so is this new?
Is there somewhere I can look to make sure I didn't accidentally change something either at the user or admin level?
I do know that it shows up on #Fedilab on my devices.

#Friendica Support #friendica #help

Seriously, I think Tumblr is my favorite social media, though that shouldn't be a surprise with how many Tumblr postings I share here, right? Not really sure why, though I will say I've been there over 13 years, and have cultivated a wonderful and diverse collection of accounts to follow. Tumblr is weird and impossible to monetize, and I love weird.

I don't get why we don't have an equivalent here, when people keep coming up with forks of Mastodon/Misskey/etc or creating new similar services, it's not like they'd have to build it from scratch. Seriously, #friendica has everything you need an more except for the look, the current interface ain't real great, and it sure don't look like Tumblr, so prolly a fork would be good. Sure, you could change the look through a theme, it does support that, but I think forking it and hacking off unnecessary parts would help, or at least re-writing some of the ugly parts, the settings for example are wonderful for the options they have, but a nightmare to find anything in. Image upload procedure is clunky, though you can drag and drop images into your posts, and more complicated than it needs to be.

Seriously, it can display images as well as Tumblr can, text posts better, communicates with the entirety of the Fediverse (handles AP & Diaspora), adds an RSS feed reader and the ability to treat them like any other contact here, has quote boosting (including those RSS feeds), is there anything better? Ok, it doesn't allow uploading of movie files, or at least I haven't figured out how yet. Oh, and BB Code allows you to do inline images and other neat stuff, it supports the vast majority of BB Code, so you can do a lot of neat things in posts.

Anyone up for adding to the Fediverse?

#Fediverse #tumblr #project

Ok, I'm sure all of my followers who care about me have realized I've moved over here from social.xcetera.biz, and I thought I'd share a few details about the why and the highlights.

The why is actually rather easy, the main reason is that xcetera.biz is going away, it was part of my business, Xcetera Enterprises LLC, essentially my email and my Mastodon borrowed the domain. Of course no domain to borrow when I shut down the company, so a new home was needed. The catalyst to do it now however, was discovering SpaceHost, who offers hosted Friendica. I've wanted to do Friendica for a while, but finding a host is hard, I had previously found another hosted instance, but it's not quite turn key, you still had to decide on a database service I think it was? Any how, SpaceHost is like using MastoHost, iKnox, or any of those others out there, pick out the size you need, pay, link your domain, and Bob's your uncle.

Somehow @#SpaceHost Help has managed to put up with me fumbling around, I'm high maintenance while setting things up, going so far as to break my instance not once, but twice. I also managed to break the admin account but not the instance once two, all in less than a week. But, it's all running, @Recalls , @The Taur Nation are both over here, along with this, my personal account which will be taking over from both @Seph :verified: VOTED and @Vex for Harris & Wallz has voted, giving me a single personal account on the Fediverse.

One of the best things to happen today was to find out that SpaceHost had quietly added the last of the relays I asked for, The Doodle Project. @Fedi.Tips can likely explain relays far better than me, but to my understanding, it's basically every member agreeing to share each others posts with the other members. For a small instance, this is crucial to getting a good Fedi feed up and running, doubly so for tiny personal instances like this. At a quick glance, it was clear this was a wonderfully diverse relay that was perfect for quickly populating my Fedi feed. Sure, not real interested in Ghana Today for instance, but I think diversity is healthy, and this is wonderfully diverse. Definitely going to be donating regularly to help keep it up and running.

So, on the Fediverse I now have everything I wanted, my very own #friendica instance, with a wonderfully diverse global timeline.

Yes, seriously, I'm inviting y'all to help me test testes@blog.taursnd.haus It's a #friendica group that's being tested before I create a new version of @Taurnation .

So, feel free to follow for the few days it will be up, posts can be shared there by mentioning them, then the posts will be automagically boosted there. If you throw something up there, CW where appropriate.

Ummm, I broke the admin account over here on #friendica . I can proudly say I'm an idiot.

Why?
Well, my host agreed to put up the pack of Friendica themes that's out there, and I had the brilliant idea to try one of them... using the admin account. Firefox now loads a blank web page, and Chromium spits back a 500 error. Ummm, hopefully my host knows a way to fix this. In one way it's good, if they can restore that account to an hour ago, it'll fix it without changing anything appreciably, the only thing I've done over there other than the theme was turn off the Tumblr plug in since I couldn't get that to work.

#friendica #Fediverse #adminstupidity #adminfollies #glitch