You do not need to follow any accounts or hashtags to participate as an OPC member. You’ll see posts from your fellow OPC members in the Local feed (aka, “your server” in Live feeds), even if you don’t follow them.
Following accounts
You can follow other accounts on the social web. You’ll see their posts and boosts in your home feed.
Since we only post about our travel and outdoor adventures here at OPC, it’s probably best to only follow accounts that primarily post on those themes. You can also use filters to hide certain posts.
Following hashtags
For a community like OPC, following hashtags is often a better strategy than following accounts, as you’ll avoid off-topic posts. When you follow a hashtag, you’ll see tagged posts in your home feed.
I recommend following #opcWeeklyTheme, #opcSpecialTheme, and #opcOnThisDay so you can see posts from these prompts by non-OPC members.
You can also follow:
- Topics: #TravelPhotography, #NationalParks, #waterfall
- Places: #MonumentValley, #Dolomites, #Antarctica
- Activities: #hiking, #camping, #roadtrip
- Daily themes: #MountainMonday, #TravelTuesday, #FootpathFriday
It’s important to note that because of how federation works, when you follow a hashtag, you’re not following every post with that hashtag from across the entire social web. Instead, you’re only adding posts from the OPC federated feed that match that hashtag to your home feed.
Because of this, I’ve added a number of relays that help bring more travel-related posts into our federated feed. If you have a suggestion for something I should add, please let me know.
Following other sources
More and more services are adopting ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol that powers Mastodon. And a growing number of “bridge” services help bring sites without direct AP support into the social web.
Fedi-first services
There are a long list of platforms built on top of ActivityPub, many of which are the fediverse open source version of a for-profit platform service. The most common ones are Mastodon (twitter), PixelFed (Instagram), Lemmy (Reddit), and Peertube (Youtube), as well as Friendica, Misskey, Pleroma, and many more.
You can follow and interact with any user on any of these services.
Threads
Threads.net is Meta/Facebook/Instagram’s answer to twitter. The service is currently implementing ActivityPub and is expected to roll this out in the summer of 2024 as a feature its users can opt-in to.
When that happens, you’ll be able to follow and interact with posts from Threads users, and vice versa—but without being subjected to the ads, algorithm, or unethical practices of Meta.
Bluesky
For unknown reasons, Bluesky has been essentially replicating Mastodon and ActivityPub, but with its own competing protocol and app. While there’s hope that Bluesky will eventually decide to simply adopt AP instead, that hasn’t happened just yet.
However, a “bridge” service coming soon will allow us to follow and interact with Bluesky users, and vice versa. In the meanwhile, you can follow (but not interact) with Bluesky accounts by using RSS Parrot.
Flipboard has recently federated with the social web, which means you can now follow your favorite flipboard magazines.
WordPress
WordPress blogs can now add the ActivityPub plug-in, which allows it to function as a federated profile, you can follow it here.
Other websites
Bridgy Fed is a service that allows you to follow websites via your account here. RSS Parrot turns rss feeds into accounts you can follow. That means you can follow blogs, substack newsletters, or even podcasts from your account.