taking a break from Mastodon and Bluesky (but not microblogging—follow me on RSS!)

One of the few good things to come out of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is that it’s been an invitation to spend the last four-ish years exploring different permutations of the social web. I’ve appreciated the chance to double-down on a website-first setup, syndicating my posts (big and small) to a couple of different Mastodon setups as well as a Bluesky account, but treating them as appendages of my own dang website instead of places where I post. I’ve also really enjoyed different ways of consuming the social web, including apps like feeed, Reeder, and Tapestry, combining social media and RSS feeds into an aggregation of neat stuff on the web.

Heading into the end of 2026, though, a lot of that is feeling creaky for me right now. The EchoFeed service that I’m using to syndicate posts to Mastodon and Bluesky is going away in the next few months, so I’d need to find some kind of replacement for that connective tissue. Thinking about that makes me think about my longtime desire to make my website ActivityPub and standard.site compatible so that I don’t have to syndicate so much as make my site accessible within broader ecosystems. The more I look into both, though, the more I realize I have a lot to learn to make both of those happen, especially since I’m running a Hugo static site that I suspect will take some real Rube Goldberg infrastructure to do the server stuff to make the magic happen (and I don’t really know server stuff to begin with). I’d love to learn that stuff, but the looming EchoFeed deadline is putting a lot of pressure on me, and I have other obligations and side projects to dedicate my holiday time to.

To be frank, my posts also just don’t get the traction on Mastodon and Bluesky that they used to on Twitter, and while “building a following” is something I don’t really care about, it does raise questions about whether the money and work I’m putting into syndication to those platforms is worth it. I’m coming up on two years of paying for a personal Mastodon server, and while I believe that that’s the right approach, it also feels like I’m spending a few bucks a month to send posts into the void when I could be getting ad-free episodes of my favorite podcast instead. I’ve also had a couple more experiences of Bluesky posts getting a lot of attention from an audience I didn’t know was there, and that just feels weird.

What’s more, as much as I’ve appreciated the switch to Tapestry, Reddit’s killing off of RSS destroyed one of the things I loved most about having a “whole dang social web” content reader, and while I’ve had a wonderful semester in terms of mental health, I recently felt pulled back to Current for the same reasons that it appealed to me in the first place. Also, while I have no regrets about sending $40 to Tapestry even if I won’t use the whole year-long subscription—good projects deserve financial support—I have to confess that a one-and-done $10 payment is just a lot more attractive of a business model.

So, I’ve decided that my “go back to Current” decision should also drive what I do about my POSSE set up—at least for now. I want to triple down on RSS for a while, following more content that way and encouraging more people to consume my content that way. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be back to a broader view of the social web: There’s a lot of Mastodon and Bluesky content that I like consuming, and I know that syndication is a much better way to get my posts out there than RSS is, so I’ll start caring about that again. For a while, though, I want to play around with a simpler setup: do RSS better, maybe figure out a better email digest approach, see if I can get Webmentions working, mess around with a more minimalist Hugo theme, build new posting workflows and new content types. Likewise, I want to take some of the pressure off to follow all the feeds, post all the places, and learn a bunch of server stuff that I don’t think I have bandwidth for.

This feels like one of those melodramatic “breaking up with social media” posts that no one wants to read, but it also feels kind of freeing to write. I’d love to eventually level my POSSE setup back to where it currently is—and better!—but taking a break from the “Syndicate Elsewhere” part of POSSE feels like the right call for the time being.

• POSSE
• microblogging
• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• RSS
• Current
• Tapestry
• social web
• Reeder
• feeed
• ActivityPub
• fediverse
• standard.site
• Hugo