You can’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook anymore. So where can you, dear reader, follow me if not those friendly and non-user-hostile mega sites (I kid)? Well, get ready because an onslaught of new links are coming. Really, it is more a list of services/platforms/instances that we should be thinking more about and testing their capabilities.
First let me talk briefly about my blogs. I’ve got a lot of ‘em. Again, testing is what I do. There’s a lot of broken things associated with some of the testing with blogs that I’ve done over the years. As long as no one was harmed, I’m OK with that. So here are a few of them.
Let me be clear, when I say I have blogs, I generally mean WordPress sites that I blog with. We all know that WordPress is capable of blogging and much more. You know about AndHeBlogs, which you are reading now. Speaking of testing, I do have testing.andyrush.net. I use it for…testing. The about page explains. I have microblog.andyrush.net where I generally write short posts and/or link to articles I find interesting. I have an about page there too that explains more, and I also have my post on my federated workflow that features my microblog prominently. I have a photo site at photos.andyrush.net dedicated to posting photos (more about that in the list below). And I have a site called Digital Media Cookbook that I have kept (barely) running since 2008. I will use this site more, I promise. I used to have Home Theater Cookbook, but the idea of “franchising” the cookbook idea was too much 🙂 I have a podcast site, podcast.andyrush.net that desperately needs some attention and a few other test sites that get spun up and deleted – lather, rinse, repeat.
Then there’s the “work” blogs. At the University of North Florida we have UNF Faculty Domains, known generally as Domain of One’s Own. I of course test there as well, and like many of my sites, need attention. But here are a few.
My “main” site is at a domain I purchased to “map” onto a WordPress installation – dogoodwork.online is a space to talk about my work online. I don’t really blog from there, but as always, I leave options open. There’s also andy.domains.unf.edu which is kind of a demo site for faculty, and faculty.domains.unf.edu which is REALLY a demo site for UNF faculty. I don’t have many other subdomains at UNF, but there is drones.domains.unf.edu, dhtoolbox.domains.unf.edu, podcast.domains.unf.edu, and portfolios.domains.unf.edu that are either functional sites or demos of things on UNF Domains.
If you clicked on all, some, or none of the links so far, you should know the basic point of listing them is help you realize the potential of having your own space to work in, but more importantly to express yourself in numerous ways. And, dare I say, play in?!? The reason to have these spaces is to establish your identity. It should be said that if you choose, they can be as anonymous as you want them. You have that control because you own them. The next step is to share as much as you’re willing to on the other places you wish to be seen. Again, anonymous or not. That’s where the Fediverse comes in. Your identity starts with something like andyrush.com and not https://x.com/rushaw or https://www.facebook.com/andy.rush.96. I encourage you to visit both of those sites to see the message that appears.
In the title of this post, I promised a meeting. All the Federated Andys. I will warn you there are as many of those as there are blogs. And that gets to what our next steps are after leaving the likes of ExTwitter and Fascistbook. You can decentralize your identity. You can join the POSSE. You can have one, or many instances of your identity, limited only by what you can sanely manage (or insanely, like me).
My main federated Andy is Mastodon – @andyrush@mastdon.social – That “handle” containing two @ symbols is all you need to follow me. If you notice, it’s a lot like an email address. Remember email? It resembles email for a reason. It indicates who you are (or what you want to be called) – andyrush – and what server you’re on. Side note: One of the complaints about Mastodon or any of the other federated services is “why do I have to pick a server?” Well, you picked one a long time ago when you signed up for an email address, or you were assigned one at work. You know gmail.com, yahoo.com, webmail03.oneonta.edu, or aol.com (haha). I have lots of email addresses. Again, testing. The point is, we’ve done this before. The question is do we want to have to THINK (a little) about picking a server to communicate on, or do we want to let the Muskerberg’s of the world decide that it’s just one centralized server. The beauty about picking your own server is that you can find one that meets your needs and has “terms of service” that you can live with. Not happy with any servers? Start your own. OK, not for everybody, I admit. Email works on standard protocols to send and receive email. So does the Fediverse. If you’re on it, you’re using the common protocols to communicate.
Let’s meet more Federated Andys™ – Circling back to some of the domains I have, there are the ones that match up with domains that I own like @digitalmediacookbook – that one exists because of WordPress and a plugin called “ActivityPub”. It allows my Digital Media Cookbook website have its own identity that anyone on the Fediverse can follow. So you’re on Mastodon? You can follow that account by searching for the handle in Mastodon or on other federated services like Pixelfed, Friendica, or even Bluesky (but that’s a bit more complicated. More in another post).
For the sake of ending this post, and getting to all the federated Andy’s, here’s a list of them with a brief description of each. Some of the domains/servers will look familiar:
@andyrush@dogoodwork.online – Again this is enabled by using WordPress and the ActivityPub plugin.
@andyrush.bsky.social – This is my Bluesky account “bridged” to the Fediverse (again, future post).
@andyrush – Pixelfed is my Instagram replacement. My photos site mentioned above automatically posts here.
@andyrush@andyrush.net – Don’t really do much with this, but like the website it’s my “hub”.
@andyrush – Micro.blog is a service that forwards my microblog posts to other spaces – Tumblr, Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn
@andyrush.wordpress.com – Should be self explanatory this is the federation of my WordPress.com site.
@cirtadmin4life@social.cirtunf.org – This is an experiment of a social site using WordPress. It’s early days still on this one.
@andy – Again, connects to a WordPress site I mentioned above.
@andyrush@my-place.social – This is my handle on a Friendica server, a Fediverse version of Facebook. Testing.
Let me finish by saying that there is such a high level of excitement for me in writing this because it reminds me of the energy in which we were discovering the many wonders of Web 2.0 back in my DTLT days at the University of Mary Washington. The potential of taking the web to a level even beyond the owning of a domain and linking it to Twitter and elsewhere. We now have the ability to own our domain and republish to more ethical spaces on the web. It’s just the beginning of what I would say is a necessary journey to reclaim our spaces, identities, and hopefully sanity in our current world. Join me!
P.S. The shirt in the featured image photo is available at cogdog’s Shop!
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