I came across this great post today, with lots of great references.
Why don’t people ever ask you questions about yourself?
Asking questions
I recently moved and thus I have to re-build my social network (the real one, IRL :) ). That means conversations with people I don’t know. You’d think that would be fertile ground for a ton of easy questions, but interestingly I’m still struggling.
A few months ago, I asked y’all for recommendations for cooperative board games. I got some great recommendations, thank you all, and my local board game librarian also suggested a few things. Legends of Andor was at the top of his list, so we had to give it a try!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new feature we added to the Jetpack plugin: a “Share to Mastodon” button.
Nice, right? Mastodon is getting more and more popular, and it makes sense to let your readers easily share your content with their community of friends, wherever that community may live.
Here is the thing though: Mastodon is just one service among many, a software used to host a decentralized social network. That network, also known as the Fediverse, isn’t just a group of Mastodon servers: it’s a federated network of hundreds of servers. Each one of those servers may pick their own software, among the dozens of solutions currently available to interact with the federated network.
That diversity is a very important concept for the overall idea of a Fediverse. It allows for a wide variety of communities to thrive. Different software can cater to different interests, integrating features needed by each community. If video is your media of choice, a video platform can be born. If your community wants to communicate by sharing pictures, a new Instagram can rise. If you prefer to be part of a smaller community, software with adapted moderation tools can be built.
Ideally, I would have wanted to develop a “Share to the Fediverse” button and not a “Share to Mastodon” button; that would have been useful to more people.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on what you’re looking for), each Fediverse service is different, and each one comes with a different feature set.
Some, like Mastodon, include a fully-fledged web interface. This is why it is possible to implement a “Share to Mastodon” button. Its interface includes a /share route that allows you to pre-fill a message input from.
Others, like GoToSocial (that’s the service I personally use) are mostly headless services; the only way to compose your toots is to use a third-party client like Tusky, elk.zone, or Semaphore.
That stops us from easily implementing a “Share to Fediverse” button, since there is no single common way to post something to the Fediverse.
What if such an option existed?
My wife and I are big Splendor fans, so we wanted to try the Marvel themed spinoff. I’m a Marvel fan so that seemed like a no-brainer.
After playing, we were not impressed. The original is better.
Adri and I have been playing a lot of Wingspan in the past few weeks. After more than 15 games, here is my take on the game.
After Schotten Totten, we got to play Lost Cities.
Do you play games with your significant other? Do you have recommendations for us?
“La Guerre des moutons”, or “Wooly Wars”, is way more fun than it has any right to be!
The drawings are cute, the game is funny, you can build nice little fields and villages. It’s also a very strategic game! You have to strategize to get as many tiles in your hand as possible, plan your endgame, stop your opponents from closing big fields, all the while building pretty things!
We borrowed that game from the local library, but we may actually buy our own now. I’d definitely recommend it.
If you know of similar tile games that you’d recommend, let me know. I think we may try Carcassonne soon.
I should start with a warning: I’m new to this and learning as I go. These are my feelings as I discover this new (to me) part of the Internet.
When I joined the Fediverse a few weeks ago, I took it as an opportunity to expand my social bubble. Instead of only looking for the people I previously followed on Twitter, I started following new people to learn new things.
This is changing as more and more people join, but the Fediverse is still a bubble, or a group of interlinked bubbles. This time however, it’s not just WordPress professionals for me. :) I started following people from different circles; folks talking about the IndieWeb, the Fediverse itself, and by extension Mastodon.
In theory, the Fediverse is a great idea. As a supporter of the open web, I love the idea of a web of small independent servers talking to each other.
In practice, it seems to present some unique challenges.
We finished our first “Unlock” game box tonight!
We struggled a lot with the first game, it was really frustrating. Luckily, there are 3 games per box (3 escape-game type adventures) and the two other games were a lot more fun to play.