Let's POSSE to Mastodon with a Feed and a GitHub Action

After building a Node script for my own POSSE needs, I thought it would be good if other people could also use it. I knew not many people would be able to use the script as-is, so I built a GitHub Action that is much simpler to use, without losing any feature, even gaining some!

You should already know that I'm a true believer of IndieWeb and POSSE, as many contents I already published show.

You could for example replace "Medium" with many other services, including Twitter and Mastodon, in Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin.

I also gave a talk (in French) about IndieWeb and POSSE 3 years ago: Ne vous laissez plus déPOSSEder de vos contenus !.

Did you see Heydon Pickering's “Why The IndieWeb?” episode of the Webbed Briefs?

You should!

Every time I talk about IndieWeb and POSSE, a lot of people reply with “but it's not easy”… and they are right!

As Max Böck recently said:

Owning your content on the web should not require extensive technical knowledge or special skills. It should be just as easy as signing up for a cellphone plan.

So…

I've developed a GitHub Action for anyone to POSSE their content to Mastodon as easily as possible : GitHub Action: Any feed to Mastoson

It currently requires a JSON Feed for input, so you might still have to build this one, if you "only" have a RSS or Atom feed. I hope to support these also in the future as they're often available out of the box in content management tools/platforms (even on Mastodon), but there are multiple variants so it's not easy to deal with.

I know there are already other ways to push content from RSS/Atom feeds to Mastodon, but I didn't want to rely on a third party service like IFTTT or Zapier. Ok, GitHub is also a 3rd party, but my code and content are already there anyway^[1]. 🤷‍♂️

I won't paraphrase the Action's documentation, so go read it, use it, and tell me if it's useful:

GitHub Action: Any feed to Mastoson

If you have some ideas, bugs or anything to discuss about this action, GitHub issues are the right place.

Also, I know my code is not state of the art, so feel free to open issues, or even better pull requests, if you think you help improve it.

HTH.

1. and 99% of the Action is a Node script, so I can move anywhere else if necessary. ↩︎