I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I’m enjoying BookWyrm very much; it’s the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I’ve been looking for for years.
I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It’s truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there’s no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There’s no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.
Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I’ve already tried that (it didn’t excite me).
I run a private personal instance. It is federated, meaning I can message anyone else on any other federated matrix node, and they can message me. But no-one can make an account on my instance without a single-use token from me, which I create using admin privileges.
The bridging is done using extensions to the matrix server, in the form of bridge bots. They will create puppet accounts for each bridged user, which they will then puppet to mirror that user for you. You also give this bot access to your external account, allowing them to “puppet” your account to the users you’re talking to, on their respective platform. I run these on my own hardware, same as the actual matrix server, which they talk to.
You can set it up in a variety of ways, but in my case, I made it so that bridged users have their platform appended to their display names. A user from discord appears to me as “Username (Discord)”. That way, even if I have the same person on both Discord and Telegram, I can find and differentiate them in matrix.
If you want matrix for bridging, your own instance is likely the best bet. If for example, you create a user on matrix.org, I have no idea how I’d go about actually bridging any other accounts to that user, as I would not have access to managing the extensions available on the matrix.org instance.
As far as I know, matrix.org and most other instances only concern themselves with communicating between matrix users. The only matrix anything that advertises bridging, is beeper.com, which is currently invite-only. It’s matrix in the backend, I think, and seems to intend to be a paid service for having all your chats in one place.
It’s possible to use the extensions of another matrix server, from another server, but this is not ideal (it comes with some access permission limitations). And finding a server with these extensions set up, and with an admin willing to let you access them, can be tricky.
That said, setting up your own matrix instance is not as complex as setting one up for the fediverse (ActivityPub). If you don’t care about federating, it’s even easier, and you can always enable federation later. You do need a domain, a permanent one. There is no way migrate the domain to another, once a matrix server is set up, at this time. The only way to do that is to literally delete everything and start over. A lesson I learned the hard way…
Feel free to dm me if you wanna know more :D