Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Social Media Technology

Testing WordPress/Mastodon ActivityPub integration

I just installed the ActivityPub plug-in for WordPress. With it, you can follow posts here at Burningbird by following bosslady@burningbird.net. Supposedly, then, this post would show up on Mastodon as a new post.

There’s also a plugin that would allow my WordPress weblog to subscribe to one or more folks on Mastodon, and publish their posts here. However, I won’t publish someone else’s work in my space, and I also have code to print out the RSS entries at the footer for my Mastodon space. Still, new toy…

I’m still debating on whether to install my own Mastodon instance. I don’t have a lot of interest in learning Ruby/Rails, so the technology doesn’t interest me, in and of itself. The ActivityPub protocol does interest me. Mastodon, itself, interests me, but I do have a comfortable home on mastodon.social.

If I do install Mastodon, then I have to decide if I want to spin up a new Linode for it, or learn to live with WordPress/MySQL duking it out with Mastodon/PostGreSQL. And then there’s the email service. Rumor has it that GMail is not Mastodon-friendly, so using it as a third-party email service won’t work. I don’t want to pay for an email service, so that would mean installing email support. And that’s just uglier than sin.

Decisions, decisions.

Categories
Social Media

Join me at Mastodon @burningbird@mastodon.social

Image of mastodon

Offered without comment. For more info.

Twitter warning that it will no longer allow any promotion of other platforms, including Mastodon

what happens when you click a Mastodon link in Twitter-you get a spam or malware warning

you can't even including a Mastodon link in your profile, Twitter returns a malware error when you try to save

Categories
Connecting Diversity Weblogging

Marriage equality and one bright moment in 2004

The Supreme Court decided in June, 2015 that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples. The decision was Obergefell v Hodges, and the was one of the most definitive for civil rights in the last century.

A few short years later, this decision, like that for Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed rights to healthcare, is under threat with a Supreme Court more interested in forcing a narrow, restrictive ideology than the law. In response Congress just passed the Respect for Marriage Act. Though the protections aren’t as comprehensive as the Obergefell decision, at a minimum this Act ensures that same-sex marriages would be recognized by both federal and state government, though it could not force states to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples.

Perhaps at a minimum, it will provide a warning to the Supreme Court that no, they won’t be allowed to turn back the clock, and they’ll leave Obergefell alone.

Serendipitously, this week while I was recovering old weblog posts from the Wayback Machine, I recovered one titled “No other word works but great.” I wrote it February 18, 2004 and it was about that brief and shining time when Gavin Newsome and the city of San Francisco, in an act of civil defiance, issued marriage certificates for same-sex couples.

As I wrote at the time:

This news coming out of San Francisco, is the first news I’ve heard in a month, over a month, of the triumph of the human spirit, the fire of those who will not accept the dictates of a hypocritical society, and the goodness of people reaching out to other people.

Enjoy this flashback, and think on how far we’ve come, and what we can’t lose.

Update:

The follow up longer essay I promised, also recovered from the Wayback Machine: For those who inhabit the empty spaces of the coloring book.