I finally took the step of setting up my digitally sovereign mastodon server. If you do mastodon, you can now follow me there Tobias Eigen (@tobias@social.tobiaseigen.org) - social.tobiaseigen.org. But more importantly, you can follow this discourse site using mastodon or any federated platform that supports federation.
Federation is an important element of digital sovereignty and is being baked into many open source tools these days. Even nextcloud, the file sharing and workplace platform we endorse and can help you set up on your self-hosted server, supports federation. This means you can use it to securely and privately use all of its workplace features to communicate and collaborate with people who are on a different Nextcloud server from your own.
For now, as I find my feet with federation, only topics tagged shared-to-socials can be followed. I also am only sharing the first post and am not yet replicating mastodon replies here. We’ll be able to see people who are following the tag.
Federation is easier to set up on your self-hosted discourse than you might think. You want to install the ActivityPub plugin created by Angus McLeod, from Pavilion. Angus has done some nice videos explaining how to install it, set up “actors” (tags or categories that can be followed or that can follow other federated sites) and then set up following.
There is a great deal more we can do here, such as effectively linking synchronizing discussions here with another Discourse site working on digital sovereignty and self-hosting with open source.
What do you think? How are you using federation? I’d love to hear ideas from others about how we might like to expand our use of federation to support and encourage digitally sovereign sharing and collaboration. There must also be other platforms that support ActivityPub and I’d love to hear about them.
