To regular readers of this blog, this will appear as a normal post. But thanks to a significant move by Automattic (the people behind wordpress.com who host this blog), it can now be read directly by users of Mastodon and other parts of the fediverse. Users need only follow the feed at [at] websterresearchconsulting.com@websterresearchconsulting.com to see posts in whichever app they use to see their feed. What’s more, comments made in those apps end up (once I moderate them) as comments on the blog itself; a very interesting reversal of the trend by which Twitter and Facebook sucked the interaction away from content platforms into their own walled gardens.
There are emerging a number of interesting discussions of what the arrival of millions of individual WordPress instances might do to the Fediverse (notably this one). How well do long-form posts land in a hitherto short-form space? What does moderation look like when each user has their own instance? We’ll have to see. But for now, here it is.
Peter Webster Digital 