Mastodon: Flatwater Free Press
Hello there. My name is Jay Hannah. Since 2021 I've been the volunteer that has been (with permission) manually re-posting every Flatwater Free Press (FWFP) article onto Mastodon.
FWFP posts directly on Bluesky
Jump to section titled: FWFP posts directly on BlueskyOn Jan 6, 2025 FWFP announced that they were leaving Twitter, officially moving to Bluesky. Unfortunately, their systems don't also post directly to Mastodon. So I'm not obsolete yet?
So if you're on Bluesky, please follow FWFP there.
FWFP posts bridge from Bluesky into Mastodon
Jump to section titled: FWFP posts bridge from Bluesky into MastodonOn May 30, 2025 we started an experiment. Thanks to brid.gy there's now a
Mastodon "account" that you can follow. When you do, every new post by FWFP
on Bluesky will show up in your Mastodon home feed.
So in your Mastodon client, please search for, and then follow
@flatwaterfreep.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy. (We can't web link you there since
the bridge accounts aren't like regular accounts that have a globally accessible
landing page.)
(Trust me. It looks weird (not like normal accounts), but it works. Follow that account and then wait a couple days, you'll see new toots coming through even though it looks like toot history is empty / the account is broken before you follow it.)
I continue to manually post to Mastodon
Jump to section titled: I continue to manually post to MastodonMost days I sweep the "All our stores" page and manually post any new articles into Mastodon. You can follow that human-driven account here: @flatwaterfreepress@mastodon.social
From that account, nowadays, as long as the brid.gy bridge keeps working,
I'm likely to Boost the brid.gy toot of those new articles instead of manually
creating a fresh toot. If that doesn't work for you, for whatever reason,
please let me know.
Why am I still involved in any of this? Well, it seems advantages and disadvantages are afoot:
@flatwaterfreep.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy(automatic via Bluesky)- real-time feed from Bluesky (critical for breaking news).
- some articles are tooted multiple times.
- FWFP sometimes toots things other than new articles.
- will go silent whenever
brid.gyfails. - toots don't have their own pages in which you can see threads of replies (it's rare that people reply to posts. I have yet to see a thread of multiple replies).
- your local server may have blocked
bsky.brid.gybecause they don't want to host bot data in their server cache.
@flatwaterfreepress@mastodon.social(me, manually)- is only updated once ~daily.
- toots articles that were never posted on Bluesky.
- single toot per article.
- I may or may not toot / boost things that aren't new articles. I figure if you wanted all of those you would have followed the bridge account?
- toots have normal threads where people can reply / discuss articles amongst themselves as much as they like.
- "All our stories" is sometimes delayed until an article is pulled from the FWFP homepage, so some articles apparently won't appear until days after publication. Unless they're re-tooted from the bridge.
- will go silent whenever I have a stroke, or am out of the country (infrequent).
- your local server may have blocked
mastodon.socialbecause your local admin thinks that server does a terrible job moderating that community.
When could I retire? When...
- FWFP starts posting to Mastodon themselves.
- FWFP starts posting all their articles into Bluesky. e.g.: I'm not sure why they, so far, aren't posting their Documenters articles.
- the vast majority of people are following the
brid.gyaccount and are happy with how it works (e.g.: no reply threads is fine). - we're comfortable
brid.gyis stable and going to stay online (for free), "indefinitely." - ?
I'm extremely open to feedback about this page, these strategies, etc. Please toot at me.
Oh, and please donate to FWFP if you can. We need more local, ad free, paywall free journalism. Thanks!