You're not shouting into the void: Your personal website will outlast every social media platform

I used to post on Geocities but that's all gone now. I used to post on MySpace but that's all gone now. I used to post on Blogspot but that's all gone now. Facebook, Twitter X, and everything else will all end up the same way eventually. However, your website can outlast them all.

But man, it sure is easy to share stuff on those other platforms. Wouldn't it be great if you could just publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere? Good thing that concept already has a silly name! POSSE. So how exactly do you do that?

Use brid.gy

There's a neat-sounding little tool called brid.gy which helps automatically integrate your site with a few different platforms.

It seems pretty cool, however when I post something here, I usually like to submit it to:

• BlueSky
• LinkedIn
• Tildes
• Hacker News
• Reddit

The only overlap between brid.gy and my list is Reddit and Bluesky. Reddit typically needs more TLC to post something since you have to select the best subreddit based on your post, make sure you're following the community's rules, etc. On the other hand, BlueSky has a simple API to just post something to your account. (note: this is a cool way to use GitHub Actions to post to BlueSky with your RSS)

With that in mind, I can personally only justify spending up to 21 hours automating the five minutes per week I spend POSSE-ing posts. I don't think it's worth tweaking my site (which only has so much flexibility) with brid.gy just for BlueSky.

This chart calls out that the task needs to be done for five years for these numbers to work. I'm not sure how sustainable that pace will be for me since I'm just writing for myself. Yes, I completely understand the irony of saying that in a post about how to broadcast your stuff everywhere.

That said, one can easily justify spending more time in the name of  💫✨learning✨💫

Try to automate it at all

So I just wrote a dumb little stubbed-out script to help me partially automate it. Inspired by do-nothing scripting, it opens each website's "submit a new post" page. While it doesn't do much, it's still a net-benefit since it saves me any time at all and I can always automate it further when I can justify it. 

Excuses Updates for each site:

• BlueSky is fully automated!
• LinkedIn's API requires a developer account associated with a company page to get the proper permissions for blah blah blah... but a free Zapier account with this integration works fine.
• HackerNews' API only officially supports read-only actions, so I'll leave it be.
• Reddit's API is workable, but like I said above, each submission requires too much attention per post to reasonably dedicate any time to automation.
• Same re: Tildes (except with no API)

So I guess my script is done. Somewhat disappointed it's only 1/5 fully automated but I'm happy with it overall.

Newsletters

You can set up a newsletter service pretty easily, but that costs money and isn't really worth it unless you have a lot of subscribers. If you have a Raspberry Pi sitting around, I built an automated RSS-to-email tool you can use if you'd like. 

But think about your "why"

Not everything you write will go viral on your favorite social media sites, and that's OK. I POSSE everything, and some of my posts get thousands of views, while some of them might get tens of views. The things you think will be popular aren't, and things you don't think will be popular, are. You can't always get lucky. 

Focus on writing the stuff you'd want to read, and you'll enjoy the benefits of clarifying your thoughts in written words. You get all the bonuses of referencing your work later, having a record of your activity, and maybe sometimes even grabbing someone's attention when they stumble across your site later.