The syndicate
Social networks come and social networks go.
Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.
Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.
I used to have a checkbox in my posting interface that said “Twitter”. If I wanted to add a copy of one of my notes to Twitter, I’d enable that toggle.
I have, of course, now removed that checkbox. Twitter is dead to me (and it should be dead to you too).
I used to have another checkbox next to that one that said “Flickr”. If I was adding a photo to one of my notes, I could toggle that to send a copy to my Flickr account.
Alas, that no longer works. Flickr only allows you to post 1000 photos before requiring a pro account. Fair enough. I’ve actually posted 20 times that amount since 2005, but I let my pro membership lapse a while back.
So now I’ve removed the “Flickr” checkbox too.
Instead I’ve now got a checkbox labelled “Mastodon” that sends a copy of a note to my Mastodon account.
When I publish a blog post like the one you’re reading now here on my journal, there’s yet another checkbox that says “Medium”. Toggling that checkbox sends a copy of my post to my page on Ev’s blog.
At least it used to. At some point that stopped working too. I was going to start debugging my code, but when I went to the documentation for the Medium API, I saw this:
This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 2, 2023. It is now read-only.
I guessed I missed the memo. I guess Medium also missed the memo, because developers.medium.com is still live. It proudly proclaims:
Medium’s Publishing API makes it easy for you to plug into the Medium network, create your content on Medium from anywhere you write, and expand your audience and your influence.
Not a word of that is accurate.
That page also has a link to the Medium engineering blog. Surely the announcement of the API deprecation would be published there?
Crickets.
Moving on…
I have an account on Bluesky. I don’t know why.
I was idly wondering about sending copies of my notes there when I came across a straightforward solution: micro.blog.
That’s yet another place where I have an account. They make syndication very straightfoward. You can go to your account and point to a feed from your own website.
That’s it. Syndication enabled.
It gets better. Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.
It’s like dominoes falling: I post something on my website which updates my RSS feed which gets picked up by micro.blog which passes it on to Bluesky.
I noticed that one of the other services that micro.blog can post to is Medium. Hmmm …would that still work given the abandonment of the API?
I gave permission to micro.blog to cross-post to Medium when my feed of blog posts is updated. It seems to have worked!
We’ll see how long it lasts. We’ll see how long any of them last. Today’s social media darlings are tomorrow’s Friendster and MySpace.
When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.
