ols.wtf / blog / how-i-microblog

How I microblog

Oliver Leaver-Smith <oliver@leaversmith.com> on 2022-11-05 14:18:51

Given the general shithousery around Twitter at the moment, I thought it prudent to finally explain how I share my micro-thoughts with the world.

To start things off, micro-posts are shared independently to the following locations:

Follow up conversations in threads are not shared across platforms, as they are specific to the place in which they are shared given the different kids of people that are involved which each.

Everything starts off with an iOS Shortcut on my phone. This takes text (either typed, from the share screen, or by voice) and sends it off to a server running OpsnBSD (naturally). A number of scripts are run with this text as their input to tweet, toot, yeet, and HTML-ify the content.

I definitely want to share the code someday, but right now it's full of hardcoded passwords and tokens so that needs cleaning up first.

Why so many locations?

I dunno really, high availability? I started this off as just a way to share a thought from my phone to a website, and changed it to also share the contents of the post with chaos.social. Later on I figured I should also be posting to Twitter for completeness. I've had yeet for a long while now, it's my fork of honk from the fantastic tedu@ and is more experimental than Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging solutions. I started posting the thoughts to that to hack around with the honk API.

I have probably a dozen other Fediverse accounts across various servers, because although federation is a thing, the local timeline is also really importanat to me. I know this is a bit of a contentious opinion, and so I am happy to have conversations about that!