Publish elsewhere, syndicate (to your) own site

I have affinity with the IndieWebprinciples (own your data, build for the long web, etc). I also enjoyed sharing using Twitter, and do I enjoy sharing using Mastodon apps. What to do? There’s a term for that: PESOS.

PESOS is “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site”. Effectively, I’m creating a backup of things I’ve posted back into my own web site.

For Mastodon, what I’m experimenting with is fetching the RSS feed of my own posts, and converting them to markdown. I have to keep track of the last post I’ve handled, and then look for more recent posts in the RSS.

My code for this is called mdmd. I run it a few times a day, and eventually my own site catches up with anything I post over there. I don’t publish the posts, but I am capturing it.

It’s made me realize I should check that platforms I post to have a standard, like RSS, for fetching back content.

Having said all of this, if you’d asked me “the right way” to do this, I’d still say: post out to other services from your own site (also known as POSSE).

But this way is more fun for me.