POSSE Pulse

Last updated March 14th, 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:

• 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
• Mastodon - A little library feed2toot runs on our Synology NAS in a Docker container. It reads this specialized Atom feed of short-form takes formatted for 500 characters and straightforward links to everything else
• 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
• X – I tweaked a variant of my Mastodon feed and wired it up to the azu/rss-to-twitter GitHub action. Because it runs periodically as a scheduled job on GitHub, no backend servers were necessary (here's a how-to guide on how I set it up)

As for where I'll syndicate my work to next, I'm taking a pretty neutral stance on platforms at this point. As long as I don't have to use them myself, 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'm sure I'll also write a feed2thread gem as soon as Meta rolls out its Threads API in June 2023, since it'll probably depend on the same sort of Meta developer system and Open Graph API as Instagram does.

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