Well, this has been fun.

1. Start typing. If I exceed 300 characters, I get a color treatment in the editor that tells me so, and a “summary/Bluesky” field opens up.

2. If I keep typing in the editor, I see a character count against hachyderm.io’s 2263 character limit.

3. Click publish and the post is stashed in my atproto PDS then fanned out to Mastodon and Bluesky. The post is also turned into a git commit for my Hugo blog in an unpublished “notes” record.

4. Add a title and click publish, and the post is still stored in my PDS, but also turned into a Hugo git commit that kicks off the Cloudflare Pages build for the blog pipeline.

5. Add a photo, it becomes an attachment for Mastodon or Bluesky. If I’m making a blog post, clicking a little clipboard icon lets me add Markdown markup for the SmugMug-hosted version of the image that I can paste into the blog post.

If I’m making a longish Mastodon post, the Bluesky post stops at 300 characters and includes a link to its longer Mastodon cousin, effectively making my Mastodon account a place for < 500-word posts. If I’m making a Hugo post, Bluesky and Mastodon point to that. All of it is stashed in my PDS and all of it is stashed in Git: One sort of speculative value atproto store, one “Markdown-n-YAML is forever” git store.

Because I’m doing all the image hosting via Smugmug, and all the image links are to Smugmug artifacts, not self-hosted images, posts are more portable.

Enjoy using it? Cool. I can work from this web editor or from a local text editor.

Quit using it? Fine. It all lives as Markdown in git: I still have the same blog, I still have the same accounts, and I forget about this little experiment in exotic publication pipelines.