Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.

I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.

View on HN

Have you looked at https://posseparty.com/ as a possible option? Supports integrations with those platforms and more, and "all" it needs is an Atom feed!

Ooh I hadn't seen that. I'm still hung up on character limits - I want to make sure the summary I include isn't truncated with ... and is instead the right length for that particular platform.

I created POSSE Party because I had similar concerns. Truncation and spacing are highly customizable. You can add a posse:post sidecar element containing JSON that formats exact presentation for each platform exactly as you want it. The built-in truncation can be configured at the account level. And how you count characters, naturally, differs by platform, which the app handles pretty well.

If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email.

But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.

There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.

I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that mattered, then micro.blog and other “Indieweb in a box” services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least as big as Mastodon.

The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.

Which is fine. Small is beautiful.

It's fine to be small, but we can still work on lowering the bar further and promoting the good parts.

Then, if there is a viable alternative to big social media, my thesis is that there might come a day when a critical mass has been fed up and finds a viable alternative that's still beautiful but no longer small.

Promoting the good parts is very worthwhile and there’s a thriving scene. A bunch of interesting people talk over zoom and IRL regularly because of events.indieweb.org and we just had our 3rd annual weekend camp here in San Diego a few weeks ago.

I don’t know about the rest of big social media switching away, so I’m personally just focused on appreciating the community that’s been built up already instead of evangelizing. Maybe I’m wrong and something open will go viral, like the new Loops video app.

I agree! Do you know why anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs didn't stick, or any examples of it being used today? In my head that would solve one or two of the problems I see with the modern internet.

I know it’s gotten some push back but to be honest I’m fond of the more manual approach that you take on HN.

While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.

I definitely won't be automating submission to places like HN.

I figure if you chose to follow me on Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn there's no ethical issue at all with me automating the process of having my new blog entries show up in my feeds there, as opposed to copying-and-pasting the links by hand.

No, no, perhaps you misunderstood me. I like how you link to your own writing in the discussions here. I don't suspect you to start automating that.

To tell you the truth I came to this actual submission to express my apathy toward the ‘POSSE’ concept but I saw you here and figured that I could somehow voice that feeling while simultaneously making mention of a sharing method that I do find worthwhile and more personable. And not an easy thing to pull off.

How much of your traffic comes from HN as opposed to the other platforms?

According to Plausible in the last 12 months my traffic has been 38% "direct/no referrer", 25.5% Google, 12.5% Hacker News, 8.3% Twitter.

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