I was wondering if Solid has an account on Mastodon or Pleroma, or other nodes that are part of the Fediverse?
Am on Mastodon myself with @humanetech and a personal account on a different instance, and can say that it is a very refreshing place to be at. Feels like the internet in its early days.
Feel like Solid should be represented. There is a large potential audience there that will like Solid concepts. People heavily involved in FLOSS projects, with decentralization passion, privacy-focused surveillance-capitalism fighters.
Are there particular servers that you would recommend, or tips on how to connect with the communities you mention?
When I tried mastodon a year or so ago I had an account on the main server, and another on a smaller one, but found it hard to connect with or discover people outside of the particular server because federation was very limiting.
In some ways it was too narrow (hard to find the communities I wanted) in others too inclusive (lots of interest in my feed from Japanese speaking with no obvious shared interests).
I have also tried scuttlebutt and again failed to find a way of making the social aspect work. There it just didn’t seem to scale well - slow and endlessly waiting while it updated.
I know some seem to find ways these systems work for them, but there appears to be a knack to it that I didn’t get, or particular styles it suits, or maybe it is just pot luck!
Yes, there is a certain knack to it, I think. Indeed it is true that when you just create an account, not very much seems to be happening. You have to actively look to add followers of your interest to ‘build’ an interesting feed, build your network.
I guess there are about 3,000/4,000 instances but federation only starts to your account after you connected to a follower on another instance. Our community account is at @humanetech@mastodon.social - the largest instance - but if you look at the Local Timeline it can look very quiet, and when opening the Global Timeline you are overwhelmed with anime, cat pictures, and yes, porn pic streams. It’s an anarchy in that sense.
But you can follow hashtags, like #ActivityPub, #Fediverse, #decentralisation or #Solid and then connect with people who post there. And when you have some good followers, then look at who they follow in turn, and ‘harvest’ some more good followers, etc. And your Home feed will quickly improve, and you’ll find some cool ongoing discussions to join.
Thanks Arnold. My main account was on Mastodon.social and I tried the techniques you mention. Perhaps there weren’t enough people using the hashtags I was following. Guess I wasn’t patient enough!
I’d suggest joining a more technology orientated instance like fosstodon.org or hackers.town where the local timeline might have more posts of interest to you. I found that the best way to get some people following my feed, and thus get some engagement with my posts, was to follow other users whose feeds seem interesting and engage with their posts.
Not that I know of, @rosano. There’s a trunk group (very small still) where you can find other fedizens interested in Solid. And there’s the #Solid and #SolidProject hashtags.
There is not; it was discussed at some point, but decided against since nobody was available to maintain it, and an unresponsive account is worse than none at all. (Someone could set up a mirror of the Twitter account I guess, as long as it’s clear that it’s a bot.)
Maybe we should keep a list here of Solid people on the Fediverse - personally I refrained from a Trunk listing, for example, because I don’t like lots of dormant accounts automatically following me.
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