We just released Convoy, an add-on service for Known that lets you use our servers to more easily share content with social media.

Previously, self-hosted site owners needed to create individual developer accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, and manage API integrations with each one. It was a pain, and lots of people told us that they'd prefer to avoid it.

You still can mess around with API integrations if you really want to. But Convoy gives you another option: connect your site, and then log into each service as easily as you would with any centralized cloud application. You still own all your data on your own server, but we handle the fiddly technical bits.

Service integrations aren't the only things that add value to a self-hosted site. Typically, shared hosts aren't good at search: there's no great dynamic search engine in the LAMP stack, and we get lots of complaints about MySQL's build-in full-text search. So we're looking at how we can add this to Convoy, too. The same goes for notifications and a host of other services that can help your self-hosted site use all the great new web technologies that the centralized services do.

I think of this as progressive enhancement: your site will still work without them, and you still store all your data. These services serve to add to the user experience without taking away any of your agency.

We're not removing functionality from the open source codebase: you can self-host everything if you have the technical ability. But if you'd prefer not to, Convoy is here for you.

And of course, it needn't be limited to Known at all ...

You can learn more about self-hosted Known on our open source site, or get started with our free hosted service.