So I was recently made aware of this little thing
https://www.ocsocialnetwork.com/

It is a Mobile-Only service at this time, and while I tend to steer clear of services that are mobile-only, I have made an exception for this because of how unique it is in it's offering. The last time any service had anything like this, was a long forgotten OC resource service that I forgot the name of. But each OC account was it's own profile which gave you the ability to make blog posts as your OC. Toyhouse has the ability to post as OCs but lacks the social media front that allows you to run and manage a social media presence as the character which is sliiightly different.

So I've just made an account there and as one would expect of a mobile app, it is pretty restrictive in what it permits. Also, you cannot create an account with an email, you have to use one of those oauth account creation things and currently they only let you set up with a Google account. This is also something that I find to be a personal deterrent but my interest in the novelty won me over in this case, but I know for others it would be a deal-breaker so thus I wanted to make note of that.

The service itself is pretty simple, the TOS is pretty boiler plate (and has an arbitration clause FYI), but it's early in it's life so we'll see if it sinks or floats in time. For the moment, it's a fun character exercise to write a profile as though the character were explaining themselves. There's not too many features, you can post and share images on posts, use tags, block tags, block profiles, and it has some sort of 'daily wrapped' thing that gives you a summary of what you wrote and how you interacted. It's very AI summary data scraping but make of that what you will. Mostly, I'm just interested in the environment it offers and the writing exercise that provides.

I had mentioned this service and some of it's dealbreakers to others and in the course of conversation it dawned on me that this is exactly the kind of thing that would benefit from a federated social media service.

The biggest problem I've had with a lot of federated platforms is that either the platform, or their users, tout them as a 'replacement' for large centralized services, not understanding that there are benefits to centralization that federation cannot replace such as optics and reach. They function best when they are played to their strengths and those strengths are when they're used as a vector for a niche community with the option to let others outside of the community peer in if they want. A social media platform where it is expected that everyone signed in is playing in-character is exactly the kind of thing that would play with a federated service to its strengths.

It is an island unto itself, which is important especially if you want to make an environment that a specific kind of role play that everyone knows and partakes in. The use of the local feed would help keep this facade vs the pitfalls of making a character profile on a centralized service like tumblr. If other islands would like to watch the shenanigans they can opt in to do so without making an account on the service. Being on it's own island can also set the 'rules of engagement' from those outside the island, and individual accounts can choose to participate with that or not.

I certainly don't have the time or means to run such a service, but I'm putting the thought out there for someone else to see that might have the means to host such a thing, because it would be very fun.

Been thinking about how, I used to compose my entries in Semagic all the time, but I hadn't been using it for ages because the setup was weird and there were some other jank. But it's been some years, and they're STILL updating Semagic, now I've gone through the effort to set it back up again aaaaannnddd... this actually may be easier for me to update my journal.

The thing with the web-side posting is that I can only have one draft at a time so I get into these ruts where I don't write a lot of the big stuff because I can't bounce between that and little posts so I get stuff stuck in my head that I feel like I 'can't write yet' and thus and up not posting at all.  I used to bounce between posts all the time when I used semagic regularly. Aaalllsoooo, Semagic has a queue system so I can spread out some of my posts so I'm not feeling like I'm bombarding everyone once. Since I have a habit of getting an idea of writing all sorts of things after I make the first post...

Honestly, for anyone getting used to dreamwidth I recommend using this. Just remember to generate an API key. (more on the Dreamwidth website) It may be a lot more accessible to people not familiar with HTML as this gives means of a real WYSIWYG interface for formatting. I should probably add these things to my Tumblr's Guide to Dreamwidth post on the Tumblrss..