This is actually the first of many instances I have planned, but I feel this is a good start, since it will largely be a private instance; that means only me a few folks on there, but still federated with everyone.
I want experience running it, and then I’ll have a better idea (and scalable infrastructure in place!) on how to run it for more folks.
I plan on approving my followers on that instance, because I’d like to keep it lower volume for my attention, but I also want to have private communication with some other folks, so I’ll have to play with the sane settings for that setup.
Finally, I plan on running bots from this instance. I’d love to create some neat services that can be interacted with by talking to a bot. Also the mundane reposting bots.
Finishing this quest opens new quests, Mastodon instances for demographics like:
Folks in Oakland
Business support
Agency communications
Cannabis users
Comments for a journalism site
The space for intentional instances is still new, so let’s experiment!
Glad I’ve started posting these here, gives me time to think…
I am thinking I actually really want o focus on an instance of Mastodon that is specifically for Mastodon and ActivityPub experiments. And because I have a lot of bot-ty things to connect up, I might go with micro.interi.org.
One fun art thing I thought would be a weird account, which I can post to from a nearby advice, any time. I want to mess with the privacy settings so I can keep folks from subscribing to the account, but followers can boost posts for comments.
Since I would be the only follower, I can just brain spew thoughts when I have them, but only highlight the ones I find interesting after the fact, with another account.
Note: I am not going out of my way to make those thoughts private. In fact, they will be quite public, and folks can sub to the feeds, of course. It is an experiment in choosing how to interact with others, using ActivityPub.
Speaking of which, so many AP projects are happening! And that means there may soon be apps that do things very differently with ActivityPub.
My wish: an inbox. A very nice inbox, to process, sort and filter user inboxes.
I need to learn more about AP, and we probably need an “awesome-activitypub” list…
A year and a half later and it hasn’t caught my fancy. For my personal journey, I’m looking inward for direction, rather than from others, and that undermines the collaborative, active-participant style I’d expect from myself to engage in AP experiments.