Replicating social silos, but with open protocols, is the wrong answer
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
I have a blog hosted on Micro.blog, and I’m active on BlueSky, Tumblr and Mastodon. I post mostly the same things in all those places.
I go back and forth on the issue of whether to post natively to all those platforms or just post once to Micro.blog and move on, relying on Micro.blog’s excellent built-in cross-posting tools to spread the word to the other places.
Every solution I’ve found is unsatisfactory.
The social Internet needs a model similar to podcasting, where folks can publish on whatever platform they prefer — Micro.blog, Facebook, WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, whatever — and other folks can read on whatever platform they prefer, and everything is readable in native format. Dave Winer calls that textcasting.
Instead, we seem to be replicating proprietary silos but using open protocols, which is better than proprietary silos with proprietary protocols. But it’s far from ideal.