Remember when Facebook and Twitter had an RSS feed? That's how they lured us in. In Aesop's fable the fox won't enter the lion's cave because the fox sees footprints going in, but none coming out. Smart fox. 🦊 Any platform owned by a large American corporation seems to wind up like the lion's cave. Our data footprints go in but none come out.
Take Twitter - it started with an RSS feed but it's very difficult to extract your data from Twitter today. Nobody outside of Twitter can view your timeline. When Twitter was bought by a new owner I was running a little SaaS project for exporting Tweets for data analysis, and I had to shut it down pretty much straight away. The new owner doubled down on the long-term strategy of sealing up the walled garden and locking users in harder. Same story with Facebook. It used to have an RSS feed! This is the standard playbook of American tech corporations. (Be warned, this will happen with LLM technology as well. They will try to lock you in harder and harder.)
I'm not big on social media but I see that these platforms can be useful for communicating, publishing, and staying in touch. Social media platforms have reach and conveniences that people enjoy. There probably is a way to keep that good stuff without the addiction and doom scrolling. I don't think it's inherently all bad. Today people have fragmented themselves across multiple platforms with varying degrees of openness and that seems like a good trend. Better than total corporate control anyway.
As an individual micro-publisher, how does one deal with that fragmentation, and simultaneously avoid getting locked in? The solution I found is to treat each platform as a feed that syndicates the central source on my own server. I've since learned that the cool people call this POSSE.
So now the microblog on my site has a feed for:
When I post something on my Mastodon instance, it appears on my home page and it's also available on RSS, and it also gets replicated across these various other services and networks. People on those services can engage where they are. If one of the platforms gets so tightly bound that I can't even post there any more, no worries, I'll just let it go and sign up to whatever new thing comes along. I post on Mastodon first because I own the server and I can upload and store images there, but Nostr is the protocol I think is the best from a technical point of view.
I used an LLM to help me build the rig that carries out this syndication. I had to dig up some old API keys for some of the services (and by the way, difficulty in obtaining API keys is a direct proxy for how walled-off and centralized a particular garden is. Nostr requires zero API keys for example). The syndication software is a virtual ball of twine installed on my Mastodon instance, and not very amenible to open sourcing. However, if you want to do this yourself I've distilled instructions for creating your own Mastodon re-poster which you can point your LLM at to implement something similar. I hope more people do this. Have fun!