In the early days of social media, there was a lot more interoperability. You could auto post to Twitter from Facebook, Instagram could post to Twitter, subscribe to subreddits via rss etc.

Social media companies wanted to grow their share and one way to do that was make it easy for people to post from one platform to many.

But with the rise of social externalities (bots, spam, political ops) and the plateauing of growth, lots of these companies closed down their APIs. YouTuber Tom Scott talks about this era some here: https://youtu.be/BxV14h0kFs0

One of the major things that attracts me to the fediverse is the renewal of interoperable promise.

A tool that a lot of people used back in the day and now less so due to the lack of api support is “post once, publish everywhere” tools.

Does anybody know of such a tool for the fediverse?

The use case I see: I post some pictures to my pixelfed account, those automatically get posted to my mastodon account, and if they have certain hashtags or something then get posted to relevant lemmy communities.

I think one thing the recent “alternative frontends for lemmy” shows is the universality of a lot of content for different user interfaces.

Different frontends serve different use cases (following people on mastodon versus mutual friendships on friendica versus following subject matter groups on lemmy) and their user interfaces create different kinds of community (thousands of followers on mastodon in a porous discourse versus tighter private communities focused on specific subjects on lemmy).

It makes sense to decouple to a degree content and frontend. I think having the ability to post once distribute to many different frontends and community types is powerful and something unfederated media simply can’t provide.

Thoughts?

  • Mad@sopuli.xyz
    31·
    2 years ago

    so you just want multiple accounts, with different purposes and audiences. see, you’re thinking with the mindset of locked-box social media, where boundaries are set by the platform, but on the fediverse people and communities set their own boundaries with near-complete freedom. there are plenty of fediverse apps that allow multiple accounts, and let you choose which ones to post to when you make a post. one is fedilab. if you really want, for some reason, your multiple accounts can all be on different softwares, but it will be no different for your followers than if they were all on one software

    edit: reading your other comments, it looks like you do literally just want to post in one place and have every post go to both people that moved to friendica from facebook and to pixelfed from instagram, which will of course be different groups of people. the thing is, that is literally the entire concept of the fediverse, that is literally exactly what it is in its entirety. maybe you’re underestimating the lack of friction? if so, you should know there is practically none when it comes to mastodon and pixelfed, and i’m pretty sure friendica as well. just give your friends on pixelfed and those on friendica the same exact mastodon account to follow, and don’t tell them it’s a mastodon account, and they will be none the wiser