POSSE Pulse
Last updated June 20th, 2025
Like a lot of the Ruby programming community (and despite having a real blue checkmark and over 20,000 followers), in late 2022 I migrated from Twitter to Mastodon for all my tweet-like needs. And then Threads. And then Bluesky. But the truth is you can't go home again, and gone are the days of having a single central source of "what's happening" online the way we used to with Twitter.
After deciding social media was no longer where I wanted to socialize, I started cobbling together a collection of tools to enable me to syndicate content from a single site (this one, justin.searls.co). This is kinda sorta what the POSSE movement espouses, but I chose to prioritize ad hoc integrations that actually work over idealistic, generally-unsupported protocols like ActivityPub and Webmention. Eventually, I consolidated all of those ad hoc scripts and Docker containers running on my Synology into a single Rails app called POSSE Party.
Syndication from a single authoritative web site means I can own my work and present it however I want, while still meeting people wherever they prefer to consume content—whether that's an RSS client, a social network timeline, or an e-mail inbox. For more context, I talked about the journey I've been on in the last ~30 minutes of this interview with Jerod Santo on the Changelog.
The POSSE I've gathered so far
To date, this site's syndication strategies connect justin.searls.co to:
- Feed readers – a few different slices of the site's content are available as Atom feeds
- E-mail clients - I put out a free monthly newsletter called Searls of Wisdom
- Podcast players - I've got a couple podcasts: a solo talk radio show called Breaking Change and an interview program where I'm always the guest called Merge Commits
- POSSE Party cross-posts everything to these social accounts:
- Instagram – POSSE Party syndicates anything containing photos or short-form videos as @searls on Instagram
- YouTube – POSSE Party uploads my clips as shorts on the @JustinSearls YouTube channel
If none of these work for you and you want to follow my nonsense some other way, let me know, I guess?