Tinkering With Social Networks
Every so often my brain goes into overdrive and starts thinking, usually at around 3 in the morning. This usually results in me tinkering with some part of my software setup later that day. The latest “tinker” revolved around how I have set up my Fediverse Social Network accounts.
At present I have the following instances
- Mastodon - 5 users hosted at Mastodon €12/month
- GoToSocial - 1 user on an old Zotac Zboz with 4gb ram
- SNAC (Social Networks Are Crap) - 1 user on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with 512mb ram
My Mastodon instance used to be €5/month but after 4 years of use the storage ran out and I recently had to upgrade the plan. Mastodon is good, but does consume storage at a rate more than other systems.
I am thinking of migrating the Mastodon accounts to my GoToSocial one. The Yorkshireman in me likes the idea of saving €12 a month and the software tinkerer in me, likes the fact the whole thing will then be self hosted in-house.
Retaining Posts
It’s important to me to retain past posts and this is one reason that has held me back. Then I revisited Kev Quirk’s [PureBlog] (https://pureblog.org). There had been some major changes since I last looked at this interesting and well put together blogging software that integrates well into a shared hosting host (Hostinger). I decided to integrate it into my website as a “Micro-Blog” record of my definitive social network posts.
PureBlog is able to produce “Notes” i.e. posts without a title. I used CursorAI to help me take my Mastodon Archives and import using php into PureBlog. This is where AI can in fact be useful, helping me to do personal projects that are beyond my technical ability to do. In a very short time too.
I didn’t want all posts. Replies, comments & boosts could be safely ignored. I just wanted the posts I had written which, in reality, document my life. The 3000+ entries were thus whittled down to just over a thousand, spanning 4 years. A nice record.
I realised that my social media post workflow would necessarily change. I wouldn’t be posting to Mastodon first. I would post to my Micro-Blog first and this in turn would be shared to the Fediverse as PureBlog already has Fediverse integration. PureBlog acts as a CMS so I can create a post from phone, tablet or computer.
In the future, whether I change from Mastodon to GoToSocial or even SNAC, it now matters less as the original post is made directly to my website. This leaves me without the headache of the retained post scenario.
I will see how things go for a while before making the plunge to make the first migration from Mastodon.
See the Micro-Blog/PureBlog section of my website
N.B If you are thinking of using PureBlog please consider supporting the project and the developer. Thanks