Boris goes through his complex social media setup:

Mostly POSSE bmannconsulting.com

I appreciate the walkthrough and seeing others’s setup. After about 3 months on Micro.blog I feel like I could still go further. I am partial-POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) but not quite ready for PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site).

POSSE ± PESOS?

I use Micro blog as my main launch point on the web now, cross-posting to my 🦋 Bluesky (@chadkohalyk.com) and 🐘Mastodon account (@chadkoh@indieweb.social). I have Bridgy working for my Bluesky account so replies there come back here which is good, but haven’t figured out a workaround to do that for my Mastodon account. The Micro blog has its own Fedi address which can be followed at @chadkoh@micro.blog, but I x-post everything anyways so there isn’t really a need to follow that. I don’t really want to go through another Masto migration and consolidate my main fedi presence to @micro.blog 🫤 (my turn to cite Erin Kissane, this time on the challenge of Mastodon migrations).

Twitter of course is gone (archives here or here) and I do have a company Fedi handle @chad@fission.social which I actually don’t use that much since any “professional” content I post pretty much just goes straight into my normal feeds.

I really enjoy the bookshelf and photos features of Micro Blog. It gives people a good sense of what is going on in my world without overwhelming them. There is much more detail on my Goodreads (in terms of updates and tracking of reading) and Flickr (where I post a lot more pics than what goes on my blog). I could theoretically push my Goodreads RSS feed and all my Flickr posts back to Microblog but I think that might be a bit overkill for most audiences. 🤔

Simple diagram showing Micro.blog in the center, arrows pointing out to Mastodon and Bluesky, and some questioning arrows from other services to Micro blog (Flickr, Letterboxd, Goodreads), implying the question of “to PESOS or not?”

Social “media” sidebar

Goodreads is the social reader’s bane of existence. Truly a template of corporate acquisition, centralization, and enshittification. I was able to quit Facebook and Google (except for shared docs with people) but cannot quit Amazon! Anyways, I started using Bookwyrm (chadkoh@bookwyrm.social), a fediverse social book-tracker, last year. It is mostly okay but has some shortcomings. I would love to make a Goodreads alt using the AT Protocol (see my call on Bluesky here).

I use book social networks not for their recommendation engines, but for the social part: I want to know what everyone else is reading! ATP could be a good solution because you don’t have your book activity and reviews locked up in another silo, and ATP could provide the underlying infra for social network effects. I wonder if the ATP approach could result in a better experience than ActivityPub in this instance? 🤔

Once you have books, then you do film, tv, comics, anime, etc. Media tracking, sharing, and reviews are a huge part of user-generated content online, and just like journalists being able to take their audiences with them I think people with a large corpus of social UGC would appreciate being able to maintain control over their activity.

Concluding consensus

The online CCU (Chad Cinematic Universe) has many different components and I fear bringing them all together in one place… is just too much! Splitting things up a little, with specific feeds (just follow my books on GR or BW, or movies on Letterboxd, or photos on Flickr) allows people to get just the right amount of Chad they can handle. If they want a more general feed they can go directly to https://micro.chadkohalyk.com and get a little taste of everything. And then of course, if they want a personal wrap-up on more of a monthly basis, they can subscribe to my newsletter (glibly named chadlibs) where I just share the highlights. I try to provide options to meet people where they are at… which has led to this fairly complex setup. But I do think it could be better.

Any suggestions?