Fedidevs.com had an exciting couple of months, so it’s time for an update post!

Killing posts ☠️

I wrote about the posts feature in the previous update, but it has never picked up since launching. A few weeks ago, I quietly removed it during the redesign, and nobody noticed.

This feature was not a complete failure because it led me to implement the conferences page!

Conferences

Adding the conferences page was inspired by a blog post by Sean Boots Twitter is dead. Let’s start live-tweeting conferences on Mastodon instead.

I wanted to showcase all the conversations around conferences on Mastodon, highlighting top posters and seeing the most starred posts across multiple hashtags. I hoped this would encourage more people to post on Mastodon in favor of X Twitter.

I must give a BIG shoutout to my fantastic girlfriend Ana, who painstakingly found and added most of the currently listed conferences!

I also started tracking and posting conference post statistics with my Fedidevs Mastodon account. One of these posts even got a shoutout on the big stage at PyCon US!

Source: Hynek’s post

The feedback on the conference features has been very positive, so I will continue to work on and improve them. The next thing on my TODO list is to allow people to interact with the posts on the conference page (star, repost, follow author, etc.).

Redesign

Thanks to my good friend HyperNURB, the site received a significant redesign. The new version looks incredible, especially compared to the old design!

Follows

The idea behind Fedidevs was always to make finding and following new people on Mastodon easy. But until recently, following people was a bit awkward because of the “take me home” dance:

This is now fixed, and you can follow accounts without leaving fedidevs.com!

Pssst: Follow my friend Paulo, his selfies from conferences are awesome!

Since launching this feature, over 54 people have joined and followed over 1,022 accounts, which means that every person who signed up found an average of ~19 new friends! 🎉

Struggles

I’m still struggling with the number one issue with all side projects: distribution. How do I get people to try out what I’ve built?

Adding conference features worked great with this since it allows me to naturally mention fedidevs during conferences, which has helped a lot with reaching new people.

But that’s also currently my only distribution channel. SSO isn’t a valid option since the product is too niche for me to target with keywords. Does anyone search for accounts to follow on Mastodon through Google?

I also struggle with writing update posts like this one! It took me more than 8 months since the last one. I could really do better and write these posts more often!

Costs

It costs me 1,83 Euros per month to keep the site running. I run it from a Raspberry Pi at home, so the hosting costs are essentially 0. The only actual expense is the .com domain renewal. This means I can easily keep the site running indefinitely without it making a dent in my savings!

The future

One thing that I want to add to the site is more statistics. I want to see how many followers/posts/starts my account received over the last few days/weeks/months. Would you also find this helpful?

Feedback

Getting feedback like the one below gets me motivated to improve the site. So, if you have any feedback (good or bad!), please let me know on Mastodon or through email!