[Fairey Mary]

As many of you know I am professionally a geek.  I am not a fan of social media particularly in its dominant form.  But I really like  this site and I like talking about boats.

I tripped over a talk by the ngi.eu on ActivityPub .  At which point I began to understand what backed Mastodon and I think it can benefit us.  For those who have not heard of mastodon it is a ‘rival’ to twitter.  But the attraction is that it is de-centralised.  So instead of the everybody logging into one massive server owned by an individual of dubious reputation.  The content is owned by ‘instances’ and can be an activity pub instance that runs on a club website, such as ours.  What is magic is as a user of an instance I can register an interest in an account on another instance (server).

So why do we care.  In an ideal world I have one location other than email that listens for posts from @atalantaowners.org, @oga.org.uk, @joe.bloggs@erithyachtclub.org.uk etc.  Without me having to become members or register with each site.  Unfortunately hash-tags are only promoted in the instance you run on.  So if somebody like the RYA were to host an instance the conversation is boat centric and moderated for that audience.   Now that would make it easier for me to find things I am interested in?

For what it is worth (FWIW) , my instance is @FaireyMary@mastodon.social and I think some relevant posters are @YachtingWorld@flipboard.com and @marineindustrynews@mastodon.social.  There are others but please don’t fall down the rabbit hold of toxic posters, unfollow them, block them and otherwise ignore them.  I would recommend #bloomscrolling but it is quite verbose.  🙂

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