justin․searls․co

POSSE Pulse

Last updated February 2nd, 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 sorta kinda 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.

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 lot of nerds and news junkies understand and prefer RSS/Atom feed readers, and that's definitely the best way to view my posts outside actually visiting the web site
  • E-mail clients - I started a monthly newsletter last April, and I've been corresponding with Buttondown's founder about providing a way for my subscribers to opt into receiving additional digests of the rest of the site's content (stay tuned…)
  • Podcast players - I also started a podcast called Breaking Change, which (in addition to a basic web player I built for the site) reaches audiences by way of having registered its RSS feed with the most popular podcast directories: Apple, Spotify, and YouTube
  • Instagram – In 2023, I built a Ruby gem called feed2gram, which reads another specialized Atom feed of the site's photo galleries and cross-posts them to my Instagram account. Just like feed2toot, it runs in a Docker container on our Synology
  • Threads - Similar to feed2toot for Mastodon, I syndicate the same short-form feed to Meta's Threads platform. To do this, I ported feed2gram's codebase to a new gem called feed2thread, which can also be run continuously from a Docker image
  • Bluesky - I'm building a brand new hosted app that enables syndication from an Atom feed to multiple social platforms, and since I hadn't yet started syndicating to Bluesky any other way, I decided to start with it. The AT Protocol is pretty complicated, but it enabled a few major changes to how I've done this in the past: my takes will no longer include backlinks unless they are truncated, and when truncated you'll see a continue link instead of the full URL or a web card embed. Additionally, because web cards can be embedded without a URL in the body of the text, all other links only show the title and the embed, saving on characters and also cleaning up the look of each post
  • X – I'm building a new app that manages multicasts content from the site's main Atom feed to social platforms, and after first deploying a Bluesky adapter, I turned on an X adapter on Feb 1st, 2025. This was made much easier thanks to the twitter-text and x-ruby gems. I'd previously been using the azu/rss-to-twitter GitHub action (guide here), but it never worked reliably for me.
  • Mastodon - After adding Bluesky and X to my new Syndication app, I turned on Mastodon support on Feb 2nd, 2025. I previously ran feed2toot in a Docker container on our Synology NAS.

As for where I'll syndicate my work to next, I'm taking a pretty neutral stance on platforms at this point. If it can be automated, I'm happy to meet people on their favorite platforms if it means they'll be able to see whatever shenanigans I'm up to.

Future plans:

  • I had a LinkedIn integration for a hot minute, but would prefer to find a free/open alternative. LinkedIn's algorithm seems to so thoroughly bury posts that link elsewhere though (it's called "linked in", not "linked out", I guess), that this barely seems worth the two hours of effort it would take
  • I hope to expand my free newsletter to include an optional weekly digest e-mail of the site's posts

Ideas or suggestions for additional integrations I should build? Let me know!