About four years ago, I wrote a post here entitled A Decentralized Social Network, in which I imagined a social network not tied to any specific platform. This week, I read Ruth Suehle's excellent article Getting Started with Mastodon and The Fediverse, and my gears started turning.
My goal at this point is not to create a Mastodon account, but rather to implement the same interface that Mastodon uses on this site, such that someone on Mastodon or any other platform can subscribe to my content via their preferred platform, thus fully utilizing the flexibility of this “Fediverse” infrastructure.
I still need to research this further, but my take is that all I'd need to do is create something very similar to my rss feed, and then anyone could subscribe on Mastodon or any other similar platform simply by following me via my GregHowley.com URL.
My content would be organized into two categories, which aren't part of the existent system, but are rather categories I've devised. The first would be “Posts”, and they'd be exactly what I've always written on this site. Articles, sometimes with images and links. HTML-formatted. The second category I'd call “Quips”, and it would be essentially the same kind of thing I'd always posted on Twitter, back when Twitter existed: short thoughts or funny comments, usually 140-ish characters of plain text. I would then likely replace one of the columns on this site's front page to show those quips.
I could even include a third category, which would be my photostream (yes, I don't update that often) and it would be very much like following someone on Instagram.
Only time will tell if I get the time and the drive to make this project happen, but at least I've now laid out the roadmap.