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?
you can follow a pixelfed (and i believe also friendica) account from mastodon, and vice versa. lemmy is also getting there, and is already there with friendica. so instead of posting to multiple softwares you just have people pull from different softwares, and the frontend agnosticity (is that a word? lol) is there
Right but I don't want people subscribing to my pixelfed from their mastodon necessarily. I want to post to a single thing and it go to multiple places because different people are on different services.
I post images of art to Facebook and I can also have it posted to Instagram. My friends on fb are different than my friends on Instagram but I want it going to both places.
You're describing the fediverse.
Except I can't post once distribute everywhere as far as I know? At least I don't know if the tool do that.
It's the other way around now. Instead of shared the content everywhere to gain an audience, you'd want to distribute one place and share the location. Because everyone can subscribe directly to the source.
right but people don't understand interoperability between platforms yet and also I think there are still probably differences between those two processes that make the "post once distribute everywhere" use case valid. Different kinds of communities have different norms and needs.
some of this might come down to the lack of a broad identity solution within the fediverse. I have a pixelfed account, a mastodon account, a lemmy account.
most of the fediverse has an API so I think it'd be pretty easy to hack around an script that does what you're asking
Right which is why I was asking here if anyone knew of a solution ot this. A script or whatever. I'm being lazy and trying to see if someone has already solved the issue for me.
I think I get what you mean, you want to post everywhere at the same time by just clicking one "publish" button, is that what you mean?
Yes correct.
Might need some bot for that, I'm not aware of any that does that.