Werd I/O

The way my link blog works is like this:

I save an article, website, or book I thought was interesting to a database in Notion using the web clipper, together with a description and a high-level category. (These are Technology, Society, Democracy, and so on.) I also have a checkbox that designates whether the link is something I’d consider business-friendly.

Zapier watches for new links. When it finds one, it publishes it to my website using the micropub protocol. (My website then tries to send a webmention to that site to let it know I’ve linked to them.)

Then, it publishes the link to my Mastodon profile using the top-level category as a hashtag. If the link is to a book, it also adds the bookstodon hashtag.

Following that, it publishes to all my other social networks via Buffer, without the hashtag. (The exception is my Bluesky profile, which I had to write some custom API code for). If the business-friendly box was checked, that includes publishing to my LinkedIn profile.

If I’m feeling particularly motivated, I’ll copy and paste the link to my Threads profile, but because there’s no API, it’s a fully manual process. Which means I usually don’t.

Very occasionally, Zapier will pick up a link before the Notion entry has fully saved, which means that links post without a description or a category. Then I either shrug my shoulders and accept that I have some weird posts on my timeline, or I go back and edit or repost each and every one.

Because of this bug, I’ve thought about writing my own code to do all of the above on my server. It would work the exact way I want it to be. It would be cheaper, too: I pay for Zapier every month, and the cost adds up.

But while I could do this, and the up-front cost would certainly be lower, what if something goes wrong? Let’s say LinkedIn changes the way their API works. If I wrote the connection myself, I would need to keep my code up to date every time this happened — and, in turn, stay on top of codebase changes for every single social media platform I used.

And the truth is: I’m tired, friends. I want to be really careful about the amount of code I set myself up to maintain. It might seem like a simple script now, but over time I build up more and more simple scripts and, cumulatively, I end up buried in code.

As I get older, I find myself optimizing that cost more and more. I’d much rather pay something up-front that saves me a ton of time and cognitive overhead, because both of these things are at such an enormous premium for me.

I could also just not post to those social media accounts, or do it fully-manually, but there’s something really satisfying about publishing once and syndicating everywhere I’m connected to people. I could save my links straight to something like Buffer, but I also like having my categorized database of everything I’ve shared. And Notion makes it easy to save links across my devices (I’m sometimes on my phone, sometimes on my laptop, sometimes on my desktop).

So I’m keeping Zapier, at least for now. I like keeping my links, and I like sharing them. And, more than anything else, I like not having to maintain the code that does it.

A little while back I shared an idea about an API service that would make it easy to build on top of the fediverse. People went wild about it on Mastodon and Bluesky, and I got lots of positive feedback.

My startup experience tells me that it’s important to validate your idea and understand your customers before you start building a product, lest you spend months or years building the wrong thing. So that’s exactly what I did.

I put out a simple survey that was really just an opener to find people who would be interested in having a conversation with me about it. I bought each person who replied a book certificate (except for one participant who refused it), and listened to why they had been interested enough to answer my questions. If they asked, I told them a little more about my idea.

The people I spoke with ran the gamut from the CEOs of well-funded tech companies to individuals building something in the context of cash-strapped non-profits. I also spoke with a handful of venture capitalists at various firms who had proactively reached out.

A shout-out to Evan Prodromou, one of the fathers of the fediverse, here: he very kindly spent a bunch of time with me keeping me honest and helping to move the project along.

What I discovered was that the people who wanted me to build my full idea were people who really cared about the fediverse, but were not going to be customers. The people who were going to be customers wanted two specific things:

A fast way to make informational bots. Twitter used to be full of informational, automated accounts. Consider accounts containing local weather updates, earthquake reports, and so on. That’s been much harder for people to build on the fediverse.

Statistics about trends and usage. Aggregate information about how the fediverse is behaving, including about how accounts are responding to individual links and domains.

While these signals were very clear, I couldn’t yet validate the core thing I’d proposed to build, which was a full API service with libraries that let people build fully-featured fediverse-compatible software. I also couldn’t yet validate the idea that existing startups would use a service like this to add fediverse compatibility to their products.

But I believe, to reference a way-overused cliché, that this is where the puck is going.

I strongly believe that the fediverse is how new social networks over the next decade will be built. I also have conviction that more people will be interested in building fully-featured fediverse services once Threads federates and Tumblr joins. It’s likely that another large network will also start supporting these protocols.

However, someone financially backing the project would be doing so on the basis of my conviction alone. I couldn’t yet find strong customers for this use case.

I think that’s okay! In the shorter term, I’m very interested in helping people build those bots in particular — it’s a great place to start and a good example of building the smallest, simplest, thing.

The original name I came up with, Sup, was taken by another fediverse project. So for now, this idea is called Feddy.

Anyway, I wanted to report back on what I’d found and how I was thinking about the project today. As always, I’d love your feedback and ideas! You can always email me at ben@werd.io.