FYI: Putting the blog back on the Fediverse

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.

Let’s give federating the ol’e blog another whack. I tried it previously with the official Automattic ActivityPub plugin on my self-hosted set up, but really messed with my VPS’ hosting bandwidth, and I kind of got tired of trying to figure out how to throttle traffic or figure out what to do about it running different crons or whatever was happening, so turned it off. But now that it’s hosted at WordPress.com and using the built-in federation kit, that shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s see what happens.

The site’s current Fedi address should be treacherous.tech@treacherous.tech if you want to follow that. My blog’s former Fedi home used to be here. It’s not longer a user on the blog, and the content no longer exisst here. No updates from this site go to that account. Yet it’s still visible and there’s not much I can do about it. I’m not that I’m that bothered by it. You can see it kind of published everything, including a couple of things that maybe it shouldn’t have, but so it goes.

It reveals some potential issues with the Fediverse though, regarding how your content can move, be stored and get out of your control. While I can easily remove a post from the blog, once it is federated to other servers it can seem to stick around there. This is an important consideration when thinking of diving into decentralised services like ActivityPub. At some point you lose some control over where your content goes and how long it stays around. As soon as it gets federated on someone else’s servers it’s not really yours. As much as we may not like the Facebook or X.com models of this world, removing content from a centralised platform is pretty straight forward. In this decentralised version, data moves and copies, sort of like email does. Whatever an admin of a server hoovering up your bits wants to do with your words, they can. This is how federated services are designed, though. There are some good anti-censorship properties inherent to this, but also some problems if you suddenly want to redact something or try to have it removed from the web.

I’m still a fan, though. One of the things that drew me to WordPress was Automattic’s keen interest in the federated web, in its flagship CMS and also in Tumblr (allegedly on the way to federating). A couple of other content publishers do this as well, notably micro.blog and write.as. But for their premium costs, they’re both still more or less unfinished, and the latter only has iOS apps.