justin․searls․co

POSSE Pulse

Last updated June 19th, 2024

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. But it didn't take long before I realized you can't go home again. In a world with multiple credible Twitter-like services, none could claim to be the sole authority on what's happening right now, and so I lost interest in all of them pretty quickly.

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 one-off 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:

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!