Da Big Weague

I have set up an account on one of the Website League nodes. I haven’t really posted there yet but you can find it here @soilseacht@weague.awful.cloud.

The Website League is an organisation that came together as Cohost shut down with a goal to make a smaller-scale online space, decentralised but closed and with consistent values and moderation goals. I took note of it when it first got going but it seemed like a a lot committees to organise the meeting to select the committee to schedule the meeting to decide the code of conduct and it all seemed a bit exhausting. But, having taken a year to sort things out, the Weague formally launched about two weeks ago and I decided to set up an account.

In practise what the Website League is currently is a set of eighteen Activity Pub servers (similar to Mastodon, etc.) in a closed loop that only federate with each other, creating a small network that is not a free-for-all but still not dependent on a single system or admin to run it all. I want to give it a shot, though I’m not really confident they can capture the lighting in a bottle that was Cohost. A smaller, self-contained Fediverse seems like it will just be that: Mastodon, but with less things on it. The Cohost-inspired Pillbug interface is cute but it still feels like I am still fundamentally reading long tweets on another social media site that is basically Twitter because they’re all basically Twitter.

I hope the project can prove me wrong and I do intend to give it a fair shake, though I am not sure what I will post there. I think in light of the closed-loop nature of the platform I won’t mirror posts from my account there to here like I do for my Cathode Church posts but I might experiment with the opposite: Cross-posting some bog posts from here to The Undergrowth—the Website League instance that caught my eye due it its stated interest in longform writing and multimedia posts.

And if you join the Weague too you should also follow Freja because she’s cool.