Due to technical difficulties, the #Fediverse integration on this website is currently deactivated.
Hi Programmers! As you may have read in the news, Canada’s 
Online News Act was made into law this summer. In short, it requires online platforms to pay news organizations for displaying links to their news stories. The law and its regulations are worded so that it only applies to Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Paying to display links was never in Google’s and Meta’s business model, so in compliance with the law Facebook and Instagram have stopped displaying links to news stories, and are no longer displaying the pages and accounts of news organizations, including those of Radio Waterloo. We’ve lost all the engagement with our community on Facebook and Instagram. We can still make posts and do live videos, but nobody in Canada can see them 1 .
On the bright side, Radio Waterloo is a big enough news organization to be recognized by Facebook and Instagram!
Likewise, Google will be removing any links to news organizations from their search and news products, probably happening when the Online News Act comes into force in December.
For entirely different reasons, Radio Waterloo is no longer getting any engagement on Twitter either. Twitter (now calling itself “X‑Corp”) has restricted tweets to logged-in users only, so they’re no longer publicly visible. The Twitter analytics show @RadioWaterloo is getting only a handful of views per month, compared to hundreds before the summer. And lately, the conversations on Twitter have become toxic, and are no longer compatible with our Statement of Principles.
Radio Waterloo will continue to explore ways to for us to navigate the dominant social media sites, but in the meantime…
The Fediverse to the rescue!
So, what can we do? We can find ourselves a social media platform that doesn’t depend on large corporations only looking out for their bottom line. And that’s 
The Fediverse!
The Fediverse started as a single social media site in the summer of 2008, “StatusNet”, created by Canadian entrepreneur Evan Prodromou. The StatusNet software was installed by hundreds of individuals and networked together to be come one Federated Universe. Today there is specialized Fediverse software that works like Twitter (Mastodon or Pleroma), Facebook (Friendica), Instagram (Pixelfed), and many more, and each has hundreds of instances (servers). And because they’re federated,they all communicate with each other, so you can see Friendica posts on Mastodon, Mastodon “toots” on Pixelfed, and Pixelfed images on Friendica.
This Radio Waterloo blog is joining the Fediverse!
Starting today, any posts you make on the Radio Waterloo blog can be seen in the Fediverse. If you already have an account in the Fediverse, follow @radiowaterloo.ca@radiowaterloo.ca (yes, that’s two “@”s, two “radiowaterloo”s, and two “.ca”s).
People can also follow individual authors on the blog with @username@radiowaterloo.ca — check out our Authors Page for your Fediverse handle. Everyone who’s posted their music list, show notes, or podcast audio file is there. If you don’t like your “Bio” paragraph or your show logo, then log into the Radio Waterloo blog and change it! You can’t change your Fediverse handle yet, but that’s coming.
All posts on https://radiowaterloo.ca/ will go to your subscribers in the Fediverse, and any replies they make will show up in the comments on the post. But people can’t contact you directly from the Fediverse unless they reply — direct messages don’t work (yet). For full two-way communication you’ll need an account in the Fediverse. Here are some places where you can sign up for an account:
And if none of these match your tastes, there are other instance locators at https://fediverse.observer/ and https://joinfediverse.wiki/.
If you have any questions or need help posting on the Radio Waterloo blog, please join our weekly training session, online every Sunday at 8:30pm at https://radiowaterloo.ca/progcom.
–Bob @bobjonkman@mastodon.sdf.org
: Sometimes people can see the content on Instagram, sometimes they can’t. Some days I receive messages from Instagram that “Nobody in Canada can see your content”, some days I don’t. People have told me their “@ckms102.7fm” mentions aren’t links. And, of course, engagement has dropped to close to zero…
