I’m still so excited about WordPress turning on the fediverse, and it inspires me to blog regularly again. Why? Well, I see my blog’s readership growing back to what I had when I first begun, I see genuine engagements with my site, I see real people traffic, not bots and fake SEO scams, and I hope you guys don’t prove me wrong! I’m spreading the word, urging every person I know to bring their blog to the fediverse. This post is a quick one to point out a few things I’ve learned after installing the ActivityPub Plugin. Perhaps it will be of help to another blogger. And if you have any tips, please leave a comment so others can know about it!

And, if you are reading this somewhere in the fediverse, do give it a boost so others can find it, and so my blog can federate with your server. It’s a every personal blog, every article is about my life, or my works, or my adventures. Read it for the point of view of an African artist, who lives and works in Uganda, but well, read it for entertainment. There’s a lot of humor, travel tales, and behind the scenes of my artworks. You won’t regret if you #follow it!

I’ll start with a problem I encountered after installation, though I mentioned it in the previous post, which was an #introduction to the fediverse, as it might save someone from pain. After installing the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin, I could not follow my blog. I went over to my account @dilmandila to test and got a message saying ‘follow requested’ yet I couldn’t find anywhere in the WordPress dashboard to accept this request. After a lot of searching, I found an article that described the issue, something to do with modsec, so I contacted my webhost, BlueHost (this isn’t marketing them. They are horrible. I want to move) and they fixed the id rule on server end. After that, my blog can now be followed so let me put here these hashtags #followerpower #followme #follow #followfriday

On the Free, Personal and Premium WordPress sites, installation was straight forward with no issues. Simply go to Settings, Discussion, and enable “Enter the fediverse.” Make note of your fediverse name, which is something ike @nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com@nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com. This profile can then be shared with others so they can follow it on Mastodon and other platforms. It’s a bit of a mouthful, though. Perhaps they should find a way to make shorter profile names.

When I made my first post, I inserted a lot of links, and then I realized I should not have. On the Mastodon App, and on the website, the links appear fine, just as I intended them to. But on Tusky, and I presume other apps, the links will break up your sentences every time they appear. It might make for hard reading, for (link) it (link) will (link) be (link) something (link) like this. They say it is for security reasons, to show the reader the link won’t lead to a harmful website. Fair enough. So now when writing blog posts, I’ll use links sparingly. Perhaps I’ll continue making lists the way I used to, curating articles in my blog that you might enjoy; Want a good laugh? Then eat A love story about a homemade birthday cake; Enjoy great travel tales? Then experience The Fun of Backpacking in Nigeria; Want to know a bit about the story behind my stories? Take a look at The Darkness Behind My Book

The other downside of this ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin is that photos and images don’t appear in the fediverse. You’ll see the featured image, alright, but you won’t see any images embedded in the article. This I think is the only downside, for some articles need images to tell the story. Photobloggers, or artists sharing their artworks on their blogs, will find this plugin useless. I hope at some point they fix this.

Now, a good way to get followers on the fediverse is to get listed on the Fedi.Directory, and I easily got my blog onto it after sending a DM to FediFollows. You can find how to do that, and more of it, in this link. However, getting listed on Trunk was a little bit trickier, because they treat blogs as not-personal-accounts. Fediverse.info asked for a server name and I used @dilman but this failed. I had to use the url to my author page, https://www.dilmandila.com/author/dilman and then it was accepted. This url failed on Trunk, though, since it isn’t a recognizable server.

I talked to one of the Admins at Trunk, and perhaps in future they will fix this, because there’s a new plugin that can turn your WordPress blog into something like an instance of its own. The plugin is called Friends and with it you use your website to send friend requests or respond to received friend requests from the fediverse. Basically, you can use your website to interact in the fediverse, without having to sign up on any server, or without using any app. Isn’t that cool? This plugin won’t work with free sites since it requires an install, but it’s sure going to make it easier for a lot more people to join the fediverse!

One final note, once you start getting followers, be aware that the count may display differently in different servers. At my instance, mograph.social, it showed me that I had only one follower (myself!) for over a week, but on mastodon.social, where I created a dummy account just to check, it showed that I had eight followers. My wordpress dashboard currently shows thirty followers, yet it still counts 12 on mograph.social and 17 on mastodon.social. I guess that’s just how the fediverse works, and not a complaint, but just so you know and don’t pull your hair wondering why no one is following you. Check the wordpress dashboard!

That’s it for now. By the way, I make short science fiction films, and I fund them through crowdfunding, so if you have a dollar to spare, do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/dilstories or you can also buy me ko-fi.

#blog #blog #blogger #wordpress #activitypub #writing #writingcommunity #africa #uganda #art #artists #artist

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I’m excited about blogging again, since WordPress has a plugin that enables blogs to federation. Please boost this post so that my blog can be discoverable in your server. It’s an #introduction and if you follow it you’ll get weekly posts from an artist who lives and works in Uganda. I #blog about my life, my writings, my films, and my travels, and I share my digital art and photography. I’m a #writer and #filmmaker though I often think of myself as a #transmedia artist. I make stuff in any media there is to tell stories, so at heart I’m a storyteller. Mostly, you’ll find me hanging out in #writingcommunity and occasionally participating in the #writing hashtag games, so #follow this blog if you are interested in the life of an #artist who works in many genres and media.

I love the fantastic, things that are out of this world, and so many of my creations are in #sff #scifi #fantasy and sometimes #horror – uhm – I hesitate to call myself a horror artist. Every time I try to make horror, it ends up a comedy. You can read about my first attempt here. I thought I was writing the most terrifying screenplay ever, with a monster ripping apart men’s bodies in her quest to win back her husband’s love. Then, my mentor at that time told me, “No, Dilman, this is not a horror. This is a romantic comedy!” Oh, I was pissed. I wondered if he had even read my script. Couldn’t he see all the gore, all that blood and all that killing?

A still image from my first feature film, The Felistas Fable, which I started to write as a horror, but it ended up a comedy.

This mentor was Steve Cohen (RIP) and he wrote the highest grossing romantic comedy of 1999, The Bachelor. Critics hated that film, getting only 8% on rotten tomatoes (ha, I like reading negative reviews of films, they are fun!) Steve also hated the film. He said Hollywood butchered his idea and he was not keen on getting my scripts to be made there. “They’ll ruin it!” He taught at Columbia University, at that time, around 2006, and I met him through Maisha Film Lab, which Mira Nair founded to give East African filmmakers a chance at mentorship from experienced Hollywood. He was a good teacher. I saw an email he wrote to Mira saying “Dilman took his mentors advice and ran away with it!” Yes, there were like three of mentors, but Steve stuck around and over a period of three or so years he helped me re-write that script, The Felistas Fable, into a romantic comedy. (You can watch the film if you send me an email.) Yes, I pride myself at being an artist who listens to mentors and critics, and I’m the biggest critic of my own works, so I re-read the story and looked at it from the mentors’ point of view and I saw what they saw.

After that experience, I thought seriously about comedy. I distinguished between different genres. That was the biggest thing I learned from Steve, to know when a story is a horror, or when it’s comedy…. Oh, am I funny? Some people think so. I’ve written a few blog posts whose comments suggest they are hilarious, and I’ll try to get out one every month to at least make you smile. You see, I’ll only have to think of it as a horror and viola, #comedy comes out. Yes, like that time I baked a cake for a girl who had her eyes on me. Pure horror!

Though, some of the funniest stories I’ve written are not fictional. They are about my travels and a clash of cultures makes the best comedy. I #travel a lot, being I’m an artist, people are always inviting me to attend this festival or that event or to present my works here or there. I’ve been to eighteen countries. I think they are eighteen, I must sit down and count properly. I travel with an open mind, and I try as much as possible to learn the languages and cultures of people I visit, and this leads to trouble. When in Nepal, my language teacher taught me a song and I didn’t know that if a person sung that song, it means they are looking for a marriage partner. It’s like putting your profile in a dating app, the old fashioned way. So I would sing it, and then get into a lot of trouble. And trouble makes comedy. I got into even hotter soup in Nigeria, after I learned pidgin English and spoke like a Nigerian because I thought it would be easy for me to blend in. You can read about the fun I had backpacking in Nigeria. Ah, yo, I was nearly jailed. Perhaps a lynch mob might have gotten to me for they thought I was a terrorist. Is that funny?

A piece of digital art I made. Not yet titled it, perhaps ‘Fish-n-Trash’ will do.

Oh, I started this as a simple introduction of my blog to the #fediverse, but my fingers develop a brain of their own when they touch the keyboard. I honestly never know where the words come from. See all this rambling? A few notes about #wordpress and the #ActivityPub plugin that enables blogs to federate. On the Free, Personal and Premium WordPress sites, go to Settings, Discussion, and enable “Enter the fediverse.” Make note of your default fediverse name, which references the blog’s domain. Like @nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com@nogranniesinafrica.wordpress.com. This profile can then be shared with others so they can follow it on Mastodon and other platforms.

Since I have a hosted blog, I installed the ActivityPub plug-in, then followed prompts to set up the profile. But there was a problem. I couldn’t follow my blog. I was stuck on ‘follow requested’ yet I could not see any follow request on the wordpress dashboard. After much stressing about it, I learned it has something to do with modsec, or id rule on server end. These things are beyond my comprehension. I contacted BlueHost, who host my blog, and they made it possible for my blog to be followed. You can learn more about how to trouble shoot the ActivityPub plugin in this article, and you can read more on this mastodon thread. Well, now that I got it working I’m looking for #followers so perhaps I should use the #followfriday hashtag, or the #ff thing? You know I’m just looking for excuses to use as many #hashtags as possible.

Why am I excited about this? Simple. Readers. I blog so that people can find what I write about, and engage with it. When I wrote my first blog, perhaps around 2005, I was struggling to write. I wanted to share my experiences with others, as writing is a lonely job, especially since I was in a rural town of Uganda, where the arts as a career was not even a thing to think about. I found this website scriptologist.com for screenwriters and filmmakers, and it had a blog section. I wrote there a few thoughts, and got a lot of real engagement. Then around 2009, or was it 2010, I got onto blogger, and I got a personal domain name, and the experience was good. A lot of high engagement on my blog since there were things like blog hops and blogging communities. Then Facebook encouraged people to create profiles, and get followers, and it was okay for a while, until they started to suppress posts unless you paid to reach out to your followers. My blog readership fell drastically. I wrote into the void. It discouraged me from blogging.

I still got a bit of traffic from search engines, but they are low quality, and I honestly don’t see the point of that kind of traffic. It doesn’t lead to any meaningful engagements. Just spam. I’ve since deactivated the Yoast plugin, and RankMath, and all that, and I just write for fun. And well, now that I can share my blog directly to the fediverse, it gets me excited that I’ll have that old school engagement on my posts again, that people will read what I have written and give me a pat on the back or leave a thoughtful comment.

Ah, I must say that I’m in a blogging group called Afrobloggers, where it’s possible to share your thoughts and other bloggers read and engage, but it is a small circle, and after a while you lose the joy of strangers finding your works and saying something nice. It becomes a bit disheartening to keep writing and only the same people reading what you wrote.

That’s why I’m really crazy about this, and if you’ve read up until this point, you could perhaps help my blog become discoverable in your server by giving it a boost, and a follow. I’ll leave with a few more hashtags. Ah, I’m not sure how hashtags work yet, with this workflow, they say I should put these in the tag section of wordpress, but just in case, I’ll put them here, and also in the tags, and see what it looks like.

Oh, since you’ve read to this point, have a small favor to ask. I regularly make science fiction short films and I’m looking for your support. It’s very difficult to make it as a filmmaker in Africa, where there is virtually no market to encourage big film investments, and so any dollar you can spare will go a long way into changing things. Please pledge on patreon.com/dilstories or you can buy me ko-fi. You only pay after I make the film, and you can stop payments at anytime. For other options, like donating via mobile money or PayPal, please go here dilmandila.com/donate 

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