Yesterday, I found that I could connect KnowProSE.com and RealityFragments.com to the Fediverse through Mastodon and decided to give it a try.
WordPress.com has a good article on connecting WordPress.com sites to the Fediverse, so there’s no need to rewrite that. What I noticed, however, is what everyone should be aware of.
I may actually disconnect the sites from the Fediverse in the near future because of what I write below, but if you are interested the links to the sites on Mastodon are:
That said, I’ll tell you why I’m not too pleased with these connections.
The Good
Clearly, having another outlet where posts are shared is always a good thing, and I actually had a good conversation related to something I posted because of it – these are good things. It creates hashtags from the tags created on your website.
Yet were they good enough? Is that enough?
The Bad
As it happens, these are automated accounts that the user cannot apparently log into on Mastodon. Because of that, interacting with users on Mastodon is not really something you can do. It automagically posts what you post on a WordPress.com site to the Fediverse, but it doesn’t handle the most important part of any part of social networks: Interaction.
I had hoped that the conversations would somehow connect to the comments on posts. That doesn’t happen. Also, because it posts what the title and an excerpt, it doesn’t have hashtags, which is how the Fediverse users find content.[corrected]
Because Mastodon doesn’t have functionality to retransmit with commentary, there’s just no getting around that.
The Ugly
Search engines aren’t big on the Fediverse yet, and that’s largely because it is by nature decentralized. Thus, it doesn’t really help search engine ranking, it doesn’t help people find your content through hashtags (the Bad), and it has a level of interactivity that is depressing enough to consider not doing it at all.
Takeaway
I am presently not impressed with this offering for the reasons above, but, I also know that sometimes time is a powerful factor. Things change, things are seen in a new light, etc.
For now, I’ll leave them up as they are and see what happens. I think I’ll give it about a month. Thus, if you read this article in May and the links to the Fediverse no longer work, you’ll know that I deemed them a waste of space.