---
title: "Building My Own Threads"
permalink: /:title/
description: "Still salty that Meta took one of my favorite words..."
category: projects
fedi-url: https://social.ayco.io/@ayo/112539955248881514
---

Started out as a joke. I wanted a chance to tell friends and family, maybe over dinner or something, that I [built my own threads](https://ayo.ayco.io/threads/112258065967208438) -- as a spoof of Meta's platform [of the same name](https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-app-text-sharing/).

The idea came to me because my current most-used platform to keep in-touch with personal relationships is via [Instagram](https://instagram.com/ayoayco). I love IG stories, and I now automatically cross-post those to FB, where my parents are at.

I don't particularly like Instagram itself; in fact [I wasn't happy](https://ayos.blog/stopped-tracking-on-my-sites) in Big Tech social platforms in general. I just think it's a good middle situation, because I still get to communicate with friends & family.

## My Own Place

I am, however, loving having [my own place](https://social.ayco.io): a Mastodon instance I run on a server and domain I fully control. I meet wonderful, helpful people over there, who are also taking refuge from the rest of the Internet, which is now massively farmed for data to feed machines-for-profit at the cost of people's rights.

Needless to say, I post more thoughts there because I feel safer; though admittedly this took some hard work. Blocking other servers, muting notifications, setting up content filters, finding interesting hashtags and users to follow... these are some of the stuff I have to do regularly. But it does pay off. I constantly get helpful feedback there, see accurate news, live posts of tech conferences (e.g., see the recent the hashtag for Python Conference in the US: [#PyConUS](https://social.ayco.io/tags/pyconus)) -- it's amazing.

Naturally I feel comfortable throwing ideas there; often when I work on hobby projects in real-time. When I get some idea, I post it, and someone can give me early feedback.

## But It's Not for Everyone

However, I don't think people who normally visit my [personal site](https://ayo.ayco.io) would be interested in everything I post on my social. I imagine most visitors for my personal site are:

1. long-time friends wondering what I'm up to recently (because it's linked on my personal Instagram)
2. professional contacts who want to see more of what I do (because it's linked on [my LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayoayco))
3. new contacts whom I meet at events

In any case, these visitors just want the gist, and linking to my whole social feed will be overwheling.

So to address this need, I built a small project [/threads page](https://ayo.ayco.io/threads) on my site, where I want to display some featured posts that I write from [my social](https://social.ayco.io).

If my social feed is the "main" branch for my thougts, the threads page is like a release candidate before something gets to this blog.

## The \_drafts Directory Black Hole

Additionally, this is a response to my personal observation that the `drafts` directory is often a blackhole for ideas: I put stuff there hoping I could refine them someday to be worthy of publishing... but that day never comes.

When I get my thoughts & processes out the way I do on Mastodon, I get the early feedback I need, and this gets more chance of being refined and published.

Hopefully, a future problem I _want_ to solve is providing an .rss feed that collects the whole thread into a single article. Because currently the Mastodon-provided .rss for short posts puts out each post as a separate article, which results to out-of-context short texts syndicated to readers.

## Being Open

Having my own page for a cozy display hand-picked posts gives me and my digital visitors tons of value, and I think others can also benefit from it. This is why I do it [in the open](https://sr.ht/~ayoayco/personal-site/), in an architecture that people can also slap it in their websites.

Still lots to improve (as said in the project [readme](https://git.sr.ht/~ayoayco/threads#threads)) but it is open and anyone can take it, modify it, _own_ it, and/or contribute to it.

So...