Microsoft DevBlogs now federated
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/10535103
Microsoft DevBlogs has just been federated and can be followed at @msftdevblogs@dotnet.social.
Thanks to @mapache@hachyderm.io!
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It's an unofficial mirror account on mastodon. That's not federated
It's not even a mirror account. It's a bot account that shares links. It does not "mirror" anything beyond linking.
Itβs a bot account that shares links
In other words, does the exact same thing as the bot for this Community does when a new post is made.
P.S. not sure if you're aware (I wasn't until I became a mod) but more than a dozen (don't remember the exact number) of the "subscribers" to each Community are actually the bots which propagate the content out to other servers.
I think "federated" is in danger of becoming synonymous with ActivityPub. I haven't investigated the inner workings of ActivityPub, but I can't imagine any way for my personal ActivityPub server to interact with other ActivityPub servers except through some kind of automation.
There are other federated systems out there: email, RSS/Webmention, Bluesky, Usenet, etc.
I don't think anyone is less federated just because they choose to bridge to a federation rather than run the federated software directly.
Indeed it just so happens that Maho is someone who not only investigated ActivityPub, but made his own implementation of it for his own blog(!), rather than using the Wordpress plug-in (but for the DevBlogs account he just used the Wordpress plug-in). And yes, you need a bot to propagate the content of a non-human account - the posts from the Communities here are propagated out to Mastodon and where-ever via a bot.
But yeah, in this context I was talking about you can now follow the blog from Mastodon or Pixelfed or where-ever - one less separate website to check for my tech news, gets brought straight to my feed :-)
I host a personal instance of GoToSocial, because it's written in go, a language I want to learn. It supports RSS for those without a Mastodon account. (Not that anyone knows what RSS is. Most of the people I know are surprised when I show them how to bookmark something! π)
I also use RSS-Mastodon services to stuff my feed with things I'm interested in. This is not just for websites, but other socials that support RSS. So far, I've had the best luck with Mastofeed. (There is a different Mastofeed project that lets you embed a Mastodon feed into your website. I haven't yet tried that, but it's on my list.)
Not that anyone knows what RSS is
Actually there was quite a bit of discussion about it not long ago in my feed. I'm following at least one bot which is just boosting from an RSS feed.
I was referring more to the people around me who are outside tech. Based on interactions with friends and family, I'd guess that a little over 50% know what a bookmark is, around 25% actually use bookmarks, fewer than 5% know what RSS is in very general terms and I know only one other person who actually has any RSS subscriptions.
I know people who work in IT who have never heard of RSS!
Just thinking about how far we have to go and how badly trained people are sometimes makes me want to cry. And I'm just a hobbyist; what must I be missing out on?
