One sanitized and sandboxed Fediverse profile to rule them all

After musing over having my social web presence on my own domain thanks to the book Indie Microblogging, I’ve decided to try having such a profile on the Fediverse for a year. But Mastodon and the most of the Fediverse platforms are too noisy by default, having borrowed likes, boosts & reposts, follower counts, and hashtags from traditional social networks without re-assessing their utility for supposedly non-algorithmic community building. 

I want something that can connect to the Fediverse in a quieter way. My attention first turned to Ghost, which already powers my flagship space blog as well as Journal J. But Ghost’s Fediverse integration is too basic as of now. More importantly, it still has noisy likes, reposts, their notifications, and follower counts & suggestions like a micro-posting network despite being a longform publisher platform. Their Reader section is good, and the only saving grace, but I’m disappointed that Ghost did not build a Fediverse experience that’s longform-focused first and foremost. So I decided to use Micro.blog as the foundation of my Fediverse profile because it offers several advantages:

• No support for likes and boosts/reposts, stripping them off the UI completely.
• The notifications area contains just a feed of Mentions and Replies from others, with an added indicator for Direct Messages.
• No follower notifications or counts. I have no clue who follows me unless they engage, which is great.
• No hashtags. In fact, Micro.blog will try to hide the spammy hashtags at the end of posts. Good riddance because I hate hashtags.
• No trending posts or suggested followers section. That Mastodon has these bad network effects is puzzling.
• Posts from all my blogs get auto-shared to my profile thanks to Micro.blog’s feature to pull from RSS feeds of your blogs.
• Relatedly, I don’t like small post editors that limit in feeble amounts what I write and how I think. Which is why it’s great that Micro.blog allows you to automatically show entries from your external blogs in apt ways in the Timeline! So that’s the route I took.
• There’s an option to hide Replies from the Timeline, making it cleaner while still retaining the ability to open any conversation.
• Micro.blog offers RSS feeds of my Timeline, and even of individual profiles, so I can use RSS to follow the Fediverse instead of relying on inferior apps to sort, filter, and search posts. Mastodon does support profile RSS feeds as well but using Micro.blog means I can strip off noisy boosts and reply posts.

These should make the experience clean and focused. Lastly, I used Bridgy Fed to enable Bluesky integration, saving me the hassle of having to keep around yet another social media account. 

I actually have been off social media since last year. Admittedly though, a Fediverse account on my own domain does makes fundamental sense to try breaking big tech and social media jails. But it still feels like breaking the law when blogs over the web are social by themselves. However, Webmentions are simply too complicated for me to even understand properly, much less implement and deal with for my blogs. That’s why I’ve decided to try this Fediverse experiment in a sanitized and sandboxed way as a middle ground. Feel free to follow me on Fedi, but remember that I won’t see that you followed or be notified of likes and reposts. I only see replies and mentions. 😌

If even after all these guardrails, the Fediverse turns out to be more noise than signal—because, humans—I shall go back to not existing on digital socials.