§1 The Why Before the How
Yesterday I asked my children (one in high school, one in university) if they had ever heard of Mastodon. They suspected it was a trick question and hesitantly replied that they think I may have mentioned it to them before.
Then I asked them, Did you know that you are not allowed to share works of Canadian journalism on Instagram? And they were surprised and confused and said, no. They asked me, Why? And I told them that the largest “Canadian” news corporations worked with the Canadian Government to pass a law a couple of years ago that required large social media platforms to financially compensate these news organizations for their loss of advertising revenue. Rather than pay, Meta (who owns Facebook and Instagram) responded by suppressing links to all Canadian news stories from all Canadian news outlets, including the CBC, campus radio stations and small independent sites of journalism.
This is one of many reasons why I choose to communicate to others using Mastodon (along with Bluesky). In short, I do not want to worry about the whims of Meta when I’m trying to communicate to my friends and colleagues.
I chose social.coop to be my Mastodon host and you can find my profile by searching for @copystar@social.coop in your own Mastodon instance. At the time of this writing, social.coop is an instance of only 453 active users. This perhaps surprisingly small number does not constrain communicating widely because unlike the centralized services of Instagram, X.com, and Bluesky, the social media service of ActivtyPub is distributed through a federation of many different servers.
You are connected by the people you choose to follow.
This is a post about ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon.
Just as we talk about listening to particular podcasts and not to the RSS feeds of audio files, Mastodon and ActivityPub are often conflated but they are not the same. For the purposes of this post, I want to try my best to keep these two things separate. Here’s an analogy that might help: Mastodon is to ActivityPub as the Chrome browser is to https://www …
In this post, I’m going to wander into some deeper waters. Before I lose you, let me let you know that if you are a librarian or in a culturally adjacent field and you would like to try out reading posts from a Mastodon instance, you could try joining one of these English language servers:
- https://digipres.club/about
- https://glammr.us/about
- https://code4lib.social/public/local
- https://hcommons.social/about
- https://ausglam.space/about
§2 The (RSS) Feed is Dead. Long Live the (RSS) Feed
This blog recently passed the 20K view mark. I mention this because despite the fact that those who remember Google Reader or still use an RSS reader are few and far between, this blog is humble evidence that online writing can still find a readership.
Blogs aren’t dead but the RSS reader should be left to rest in peace because your social network of choice is now your RSS reader.
I subscribe to a variety of authors who don’t regularly their work on Bluesky or Mastodon but will share any new online work or publication just made available. You would think this would mean that their work gets lost in the constant churning maelstrom of people posting through it, but I found great success in keeping up with these particular type of writers by setting up a notification for when they update their feed. This means that you don’t have to check in constantly to make sure you haven’t missed an update from a favourite creator.
The other alternative to the RSS reader is the email update that a new blog post is available. Of course, if you are going to alert your readership that you have online writing available, you may as well send them the post in the email itself. This hybrid approach makes the distinction between newsletter and blog incredibly weird and blurry.
I have a newsletter called The University of Winds that I publish using Ghost. Every post has a stable internet address for linking and sharing, and so its not unlike building a website. As such, Ghost can provide an RSS feed for those who don’t want to subscribe to updates with an email address.
WordPress, the software that I use to compose and host The Librarian of Things is very similar. You can subscribe to this blog via its RSS feed or by providing an email address. Or you can do this third thing… you can follow the social media account for this blog that uses ActivityPub.
Both Ghost (below) and WordPress (above) allow users to publish their posts using ActivityPub and follow other users on their platforms.
While I can share screen-captures of my mita@uofwinds.com, or MitaWilliams@librarian.aedileworks.com Mastodon accounts, I can’t give you a static link to either of these profiles because they are published through Ghost and WordPress.
This is just one of the things I find that is is difficult to convey about the differences between centralized social-media (X, Instagram) and those made possible with the ActivityPub protocol and federated social media. You can have an Instagram post or a TikTok, but you can’t see a TikTok through Instagram (unless a person scrapes it and republished the post).
But federated media is different.
Here’s one of my favourite explanations:
ActivityPub is plumbing. It is plumbing built on top of the web, which coordinates the ability for independently operated services, for example a collection of federated social media services, to exchange messages with each other in a decentralized manner.
If that sounds like a bit like how email works that’s because it is. This is often what ActivityPub compares itself to. The salient point being that you don’t have to run your own email server but you can and it will still be able to interoperate with people who don’t.
And here’s a fact that might really mess you up:
You can subscribe to an ActivityPub feed using your RSS feed reader. This is a screenshot of me subscribing to the European Commission using my ionreader account
§3 “Social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object”
I distinctly felt very confused when I first stumbled upon Bookwyrm.social. I checked it out because it was touted as an independent replacement for the likes of Amazon’s Goodreads. And at first glance, it sorta looks the same.
But then I figured out that the site is essentially made out of different people’s ActvityPub streams, which can be shared and subscribed to outside of Bookwyrm.
Years and years ago, I wrote this:
Compare these two quotes:
“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” (Infovore: Playing Together: What Games Can Learn from Social Software)
and
“cultural heritage results from EXCHANGE OF IDEAS about objects – it is not located IN them” (slide 53: Open, social and linked: What do current web trends tell us about the future of digital libraries)
There are very few GLAM institutions that have recognized and responded to this particular affordance of social networks. One that has — and the only one that I know of that is actively exploring the possibilities of ActivityPub — is the SFO Museum under the guidance of Aaron Straup Cope.
In short, Aaron has made it possible to “subscribe” to the objects of the SFO Museum using ActivityPub.
What does it mean when every object in a museum has its own social media account. Why would you even do this? Aaron is the best person to ask:
- Holding Hands with the “Fediverse” – ActivityPub at SFO Museum
- it’s not magic – finding our way back to “just f*cking do it” from “move fast and break things”
- Talking about the Pen without talking about the Pen
What I love about this particular practice is that it suggests that items in a library or museum collection are available to be shared and that it is okay that they they are shared at the attention rate of iterant visitors, scholars or institutions.
I can find no better way to end this section than with this post:
§4 ActivityPub needs local champions
Every once in a while, I search my local newspaper for the words mastodon. I have yet to find a mention of this social media ecosystem.
If I search for Bluesky, I can find two authors who have included their Bluesky social media accounts in their author profile section. There is no mention of the words ActivityPub or Fediverse.
On the other hand, one can find articles about Telegram, Gab, Truth Social, and X.
And there are articles about the dangers of Snapchat, Instagram, Roblox, and Discord along with mentions of Yik Kak, Kik, and Hoop and other social media platforms that I have never heard of.
Clearly we cannot expect commercial platforms to advocate for their non-profit replacements.
§5 An ActivityPub Membership Drive
I would like to see the government agencies, libraries and museums, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations that serve my community to make their social media posts also available via ActvityPub so I can choose to subscribe to updates without having to have an account on X.com, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok.
Getting to this particular future is going to require a lot of advocacy from a lot of people from their locales.
This blog post is the first step I’ve taken towards my own work in this space.
