Which publishing platform would syndicate to Mastodon?
December 8, 2022 5:13 PM   Subscribe

I have a site where I often update the content - sometimes adding a new page/entry, but more often updating an existing entry. Right now everything is done by hand: a text editor and an FTP client. After I update the site I often then go to Mastodon and hand-write a post talking about the update. But I wonder if there's a way to automate that with a publishing platform - for blogs, or wikis, or otherwise - that would post to Mastodon any time I updated or added a page, linking back to the updated page.

I know that I would need to migrate my hand-built content to a platform of some sort - that's fine. I just wonder which platform it would be. And I would prefer something open-source and/or ethical, not a big corporate - certainly not a Big Tech-owned - platform.

I'm familiar with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) but am not sure how to put it in practice in this case. Thanks in advance.
posted by mark7570 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You can probably do it with brid.gy, but it ultimately depends on your website and how motivated you are to get it working. Could be very easy or could require some new plumbing on your own website. In any case, this should give you a good place to start. Indieweb types are usually very helpful as long as you've made an effort, so don't be afraid to reach out if things aren't working.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 5:27 PM on December 8, 2022


Oh another way to do this would be to feed your feed to Masto, assuming your website (or whatever platform you migrate to) supports RSS.

I'm not sure about what to migrate to if you do need to do that. If I were to make a new blog/regularly updated website I'd do it via a static site generator but ymmv.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 5:46 PM on December 8, 2022


Tumblr has said it's adding support for ActivityPub, the Mastodon syndication protocol. I understand correctly, this would mean that Mastodon instances could federate with your Tumblr blog and Mastodon users could get your Tumblr posts in some form directly in their feeds.
posted by grobstein at 6:01 PM on December 8, 2022


WordPress definitely has one or two autopost-to-Mastodon plugins.
posted by humbug at 7:09 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]


There are writing-optimized platforms on the Fediverse, I've found. One is write.as and WriteFreely, if you're up for a move, as you say. If not, you should be able to plug in your RSS feed into a federated feed as well, per above comments.
posted by cendawanita at 9:45 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]


I use write.as to syndicate to the Fediverse. And I think any of the projects listed at fediverse.info here should be followable on Mastodon.
posted by nthdegx at 3:46 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


If you are doing it all by hand and the site has RSS then the RSS method listed above would work. I know that mathowie -- and kottke -- have set up bots on botsin.space to post their RSS updates that way. But that looks like it is challenging if one doesn't have some experience with CLI or programming? *shrug* I expect that matt will blog how he did it though as that is his thing.

As others have mentioned if your site has a CMS like Wordpress there are tools for either automatically posting your entries to your mastodon account or turning your wordpress site into it's own instance. I have used both, for different reasons. The automatic post to mastodon when creating a new blog post is the easier one.
posted by terrapin at 8:10 AM on December 9, 2022


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