Announcing a blog to the Fediverse

There has been a little bit of noise eminating from my blog for the past few days - we’ll just call that the collateral damage of being Under Construction.

A few weeks ago, I ran a highly scientific poll asking where people would like to get notified of new posts in this space. The results weren’t necessarily surprising I guess, but they did make me decide to figure out how to announce new blog posts into the Fediverse.

Because I’m me and I would rather spend 10 hours automating something than do a small 5 minute action 10 times, I decided that simply copy/pasting a link onto my Fediverse account on Polymaths each time I post isn’t an acceptable answer. Instead, this would need to be something that Just Works.

The options

To that point, there are a small handful of apps that will read a static site feed and announce new posts to various services. Three of them seem to have any sort of traction

• Bridgy
• Bridgy Fed
• Hatsu

Bridgy / Bridgy Fed

I glanced quickly at Bridgy and Bridgy Fed - they’re essentially the same service; Bridgy acts on an existing account (essentially connecting to your personal account), while Bridgy Fed acts as it’s own accounts. The latter did seem like what I wanted, however the emphasis seems more on translating accounts across multiple services (i.e. Bluesky <-> Mastodon <-> Reddit <-> Tumblr, etc) instead of a simple follow mechanism. Cool concept, but I’m not really trying to build a social web. They also depend on microformats2 being well implemented on the site; I’ll get there eventually, but that’s not currently true on mine.

Hatsu

This seems to be a very beta project, but other than that suits my conceptual needs almost perfectly

• Self hosted
• Light footprint
• Focuses on announcing static feeds to the Fediverse, not bridging the world

The largest downside is that based on the compatability chart only Mastodon is actually supported, while my primary ActivityPub usage is via GoToSocial. I do have a few testing accounts on some Mastodon servers though, and I’ve been looking for a Rust project to potentially contribute back upstream to, so maybe this will do it?

Installation

Theoretically, this is pretty straightforward - the docs do a really good job of confusing it, though. It’s a simple process

• Set up an RSS/Atom/JSON feed for your site
• Make sure the feeds are auto-discoverable via meta tags
• Set up redirects via some simple HTML in .well-known
• Run a small web server either as a binary or docker container

I chose to run via docker-compose with a Postgresql back end because I will likely be moving this service across a few hosts, and this makes it easily portable for me.

So now, from your Mastodon account in any client you can follow @n1cck.us@blogs.onlyhams.radio and get notified when new blog posts come out (infrequently)

To-Do

• Figure out how to get images (profile picture, header image) onto the account.
• Potentially help smash GoToSocial compatibility into the follow API
• Implement a callback system to scrape the toot replies to the announcement post and display them on the site. This requires a bit of JavaScript, though, and I’m not sure I want to add that in.
• Write more so that this was actually worth my time

I do like penpals, so if you want to ask questions about the insanity, send me a message somewhere and I’ll be happy to answer what I can.