Hi everyone -

I’ve been exploring the fediverse for the past few months. I stood up my own Mastodon instance (which later exploded in comical fashion.) I’m now up as @jpbutler@mastodon.boston which works wonderfully and for which I needn’t sysadmin.

So then, the question was how I should incorporate fediverse links into Serendeputy, while still being respectful of the various communities.

I’ve created a new type of tag, the Poster tag. In the same way that links I tweet from Serendeputy’s Twitter account are tagged “@serendeputy,” links posted from my Mastodon account are tagged “@jpbutler@mastodon.boston.”

You can follow these “Poster” tags in the same way as any other tag, you can get them by email, you can can tune them up or down in your profile, and you can access them via RSS.

My Mastodon Librarian sees links to Mastodon accounts, and hits their RSS feeds every hour or so. The librarian respects robots.txt and other settings, so it should respect every poster’s and every instance’s preferences. If anything is misbehaving, please drop me a line: jason@ this domain.

Coming Soon

I’m working on signing in with your Mastodon account and attaching it to your profile. This will automate a lot of things for you, but I need to write an oAuth client for this, and that might take a couple of weeks.

Please let me know what you think.