3 minute read
This blog is on the fediverse
Follow @[email protected] from Mastodon, Pixelfed or any fediverse app. Reply, like, boost or quote from wherever you are, and once a team member has reviewed your reply, it shows up here.
Most blogs give you an RSS feed and a comment box. This one is a fediverse account.
Every post here is published by @[email protected]. Follow it from Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, GoToSocial, Misskey or anything else that speaks ActivityPub, and new posts land in your home feed next to everything else you follow. Reply from your own app, and after a quick look from a moderator, your reply appears under the post on fedidb.com.
No new account. No sign-up. No comment form.
Follow it from anywhere
Search for @[email protected] in your app and follow it. Each new post arrives as a short note: the title, a summary, a link to the full post, its hashtags and the header image. The full post stays here, where the charts, tables and footnotes work properly.
Prefer a feed reader? The Atom feed is still at fedidb.com/blog/feed.xml.
A FediDB post in a Mastodon home timeline.
Your replies live here too
Reply to a post from your server and it lands at the bottom of the page once it’s approved. You reply where you already are, with the account you already have, and the conversation stays on the fediverse.
Long threads stay readable. Replies are numbered, and a reply to another reply says which one it answers, with a link, instead of indenting until the text is one word wide. Long replies fold with a Read more, and content warnings are respected.
Each reply shows its own likes and boosts. Those live on the replier’s server, not ours, so FediDB reads them from there, at most once an hour.
Images come along too, up to five per reply, in a row you can swipe through. They start blurred, with a note that FediDB doesn’t review images from other servers, and appear only when you tap them.
Replies with an “In reply to” link and a blurred image.
One detail we care about: avatars and images are copied to FediDB’s own servers. Reading a page here never sends your IP address to someone else’s server.
A person reads every reply first
Any account on any server can reply to a public post, and that includes spam accounts. So replies here wait for a moderator before they appear. We get to them as quickly as we can, and nobody else sees a reply while it waits.
If you reply often, we’ll mark your account as always approved, and your replies will show up straight away from then on. That’s separate from any role you have on FediDB.
A reply we don’t approve stays on your server and in your followers’ timelines, like any other post. We just don’t show it here. If an approved reply turns out to be a problem later, we can still hide it.
Quotes, with consent
Quote posts are new to a lot of the fediverse, and the way they’re arriving is worth getting right. This blog supports FEP-044f, the proposal Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica and others use for consent-respecting quotes.
In short, every post says who may quote it. Ours say anyone can, and the approval is automatic. When your server asks to quote one of our posts, we answer with a small approval record that your server attaches to the quote.
If a quote ever turns into a pile-on, we can revoke that approval. Servers that follow the proposal then stop treating it as an approved quote. Being quotable by default and still able to say no felt like the right balance for a project blog.
Who’s here
The followers page shows everyone following the blog. Accounts that turned off discovery on their own server are counted but not listed, because that setting means something.
Tap the like or boost count on any post to see who reacted.
The followers page.
Try it
Reply to this post from your fediverse account. Say hello, tell us what you’d like FediDB to track next, or quote it with your own take. Once we’ve read it, you’ll show up right below.
Thanks to Claire for FEP-044f, and to the GoToSocial developers, whose interaction policies it builds on.