Hello Fedi friends,
This morning I felt compelled to compile in a database all my federated accounts: from microblogging to photo sharing, longform writing and "threadiverse" profiles (those from federated alternatives to Reddit). As I mentioned in my previous post, "consolidate" will be my mantra for the next 6 months.
There is a section in my Fediverse promo video where I say "over 15 million people are already using it... I'm one of them."
I often joked that the "honest version" of the video will have pop-ups completely filling up the screen with ALL my Fediverse user names, across various software. Because how many profiles have I accumulated in my year of testing software and interoperability, in addition to my self-hosting experiments?
I didn't know what the number was until this morning.
And even I was surprised.
I put up this poll on my Mastodon account, asking people to guess how many federated accounts I have:
Guess what? The minority was in the right. Because at the moment I have 19 federated accounts. Yes, nineteen, you read that right.
I organized them by activity level, so, for full transparency:
6 are currently active: Bonfire (testing it at the moment), self-hosted PeerTube, self-hosted Pixelfed, self-hosted GoToSocial, Mastodon and the federated Wordpress blog of my personal site elenarossini.com.
4 see occasional use (I'd say once every blue moon): Lemmy, my self-hosted Friendica and two other federated Wordpress sites (for my film projects).
6 are currently inactive and rarely checked: an old Lemmy account on a separate instance, PieFed, Mbin, Sharkey, Misskey (I signed up to check it out) and Loops (grabbed a username but never used it).
3 have been moved or deleted: my previous Friendica instance (the first one I ever tried), my first PeerTube account (on MakerTube) and my first Pixelfed account (on pixelfed.social)
Theoretically speaking, NextCloud is also part of the Fediverse, but I have never used its social features. So if we counted NextCloud, the total number would be 20.
This exercise made me realize that in addition to cleaning up and disposing of accounts I no longer use, I should probably use others in a more mindful way. Namely: Lemmy. I check it sporadically and post on it once every few months, but I don't want to be a freeloader. For accounts I actively use on the Fediverse, I either donate to them... or I self-host them. I'm about to go donate to lemmy.world for the occasional use of it over the year. And I am now tempted to self-host it.
Many people have suggested I install PieFed instead but alas YunoHost doesn't offer it in its app catalogue.
Moral of the story: in my efforts to consolidate accounts I may end up self-hosting a new thing. Ha!
Thanks for being here,
Elena
P.S.: if one day my Fediverse account number goes up to 25, please stage an intervention
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