Blog: social media

My #introduction on Mastodon

2022-11-10 by Pablo Morales

This post was written in en

Image without description

Pablo joined Mastodon!

Click here to see my #introduction post at the bottom! Don't forget to follow me on Mastodon!

We all know the news of the fire storm that is happening with Twitter and lighter fluid known as Elon Musk is throwing at it.

Mastodon is a social media service that is free. It pretty much acts like twitter with the same functionality but the name of the functions are named differently.

  • post "toots" (instead of tweets),
  • follow other people and organizations,
  • favorite (like) and
  • boost (retweet) posts from other people.

I decided to join the community and so far I am enjoying it. When I mean joined, I actually created my own Mastodon instance on my server. More on this later. So for I am loving the decentralized platform and being able to control various aspects to it. My first experience with federation was the use of OwnCloud and its variants such as NextCloud. This concept has been around for quite some time.

I chose to host my own instance because I like my domain (lifeofpablo.com) and it gave me an opportunity to learn how to manage an instance and learn how to be a user as well. It's been a great experience. If there is question or something I don't know I visit the Mastodon Documentation . This where the instructions are located to install your own instance. The key to installing your own instance is making sure Node.js is setup correctly on your server. It's pretty straight forward.

My Instance Setup:

Back-End

Front-End

  • Single User Mode (Just Me)
    • At this time no registrations (Please follow me!)
  • I love that i can use my main domain as the communicative user domain.

Goals:

Background

I would like to use Mastodon and the oAuth (used for login system) as a way to build apps, not necessarily clients. These apps would be an extension to my Mastodon instance. I'd use the login system to login to these apps to pull and use data.

Steps

  • Use Mastodon as backend for authentication
  • Build Node.js app using Mastodon (oAuth) as a login system for an internal app.
  • Create a dashboard where I can see metrics, trends, push system wide notifications, server maintenance, etc. Essentially a backend management.
  • Move many of the administration features to the dashboard with the option of allowing features to be available.

Conclusion

It's been great getting to use Mastodon on the server-side and as a user. I see a great future for Mastodon and other decentralized, federated services (and other terminology) out there.

I'm sure my goals/vision will grow on what I can do with my Mastodon instance. I know I will eventually migrate and upgrade server resources such as RAM, storage, processing power. I also need to make sure I concious about how much energy and being carbon neutral or carbon negative.

Introduction Post

My Uses of Social Media

2016-05-21 by Pablo Morales

This post was written in en

It is hard to remember a life without social media. It is such an important part of our lives that we just seem to not live without it. I remember growing up in that transition that led to the explosion of the use of social media as a part of our daily lives.

I am currently taking an online class for my capstone requirement. The class that I am taking is SOWK 388: Social Media, Digital Activism, and eCitizenship. So for my class, I have to make a blog post answering the following questions. Do you use it? Why/why not? Which forms of social media do you use? and What benefits and drawbacks have you personally seen to using social media?

  • I use social media on a daily basis as long as I can remember. It plays an important part in my life and I have many different purposes that I utilize it for. Mostly I use it to keep others updated with my life as well as to keep up with those who live down the road or across the globe. I am just accustomed to using social media because I grew up with it and it is just the norm of the time. I remember using MSN Messenger to talk with my friends right after school about the latest news and what not. Those were the times.
  • The forms of social media that I use are social networks, social news outlets, media sharing, Blogs and group messaging services. These are just a few that I use. Specifically for social networks, I utilize Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. One of my favorite social news outlets is Buzzfeed. Most media sharing sites are video sites. Video sites that are popular and those that I use are Youtube, Vimeo and of course Netflix. Blogs are important to me. I host my blog on my website which I write about various topics and I integrate other social media forms within my blog and posts. GroupMe is a popular form of social media as well that is used for group messaging.
  • There are many benefits and drawbacks that I have experienced personally using social media. The benefits of social media is keeping up with friends and family one does not see daily. It has helped me get a job in the past. It is really useful to become creative and asking for help because I know there are people always willing to help me out when I am in a crunch. It is unfortunate that there are many drawbacks that I have experienced personally. I have witnessed cyberbullying to others. This is especially true when others do not have the same opinion that was expressed by someone. I have gone through this before and received much backlash. The biggest drawback was when I posted something without really thinking much about it and almost led me to problems down the road.