Future: additional Connection_Providers (Threads, Nostr, email newsletter)

[RCowles]

Stub — flesh out later when the Radical Month MVP epics ship and we have signal on which silos matter.

Internal tracking: DOTCOM-16922

Context

FOSSE today ships two Connection_Providers: ActivityPub (Mastodon and the wider fediverse) and atproto (Bluesky). The Connection_Provider architecture introduced in PR #27 was deliberately pluggable so we can add more.

POSSE's framing — Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — implies the value of a POSSE hub scales with how many "elsewheres" it reaches. Three concrete near-term candidates surfaced from the Citation Needed / IndieWeb wiki / Molly White micro-blog reading:

1. Threads — Meta now exposes ActivityPub federation on Threads. Likely cheapest add: probably falls out of the existing AP path with minimal FOSSE-side work, but worth confirming end-to-end (handle discovery, reply backfeed, deletion semantics).
2. Nostr — protocol with a clean "your domain is your identity" story (NIP-05) that pairs naturally with WebFinger / did:web work. Smaller user base than Bluesky but high alignment with FOSSE's self-hosted-first ethos.
3. Email newsletter (Buttondown / listmonk / native) — Molly White explicitly calls RSS the original POSSE channel. Email subscribers are the next tier up: a real syndication target, not just a feed. Could ship as "every published post fans out to your list" with per-post opt-out.

Why deferred

• The Radical Month MVP is self-hosted-first with AP + atproto. Adding providers before that is demoable would dilute the demo.
• We don't yet know which silos FOSSE users actually want next. Adoption signal from FOSSE usage tracking should drive the order.
• Threads via AP may "just work" once the MVP epics ship — would change the scoping significantly.

When to flesh this out

After the Radical Month demo, when:

• The MVP epics are shipped and stable.
• Adoption / metrics work is producing real signal.
• We have at least one external partner running FOSSE in production and surfacing concrete silo asks.

Out of scope here

• Routing / per-post-type targeting → tracked separately in Future: per-post-type syndication routing engine #43.
• Hosted relay infrastructure → tracked as a separate exploration.
• AT Protocol niche lexicons (standard.site etc.) → tracked as a separate exploration.

References

• https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/
• https://indieweb.org/POSSE
• https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/202403091817

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This is intentionally a long-horizon idea — not on our near-term plate, but external interest and contributions are welcome. Discussion happens here; internal Automattic tracking lives in Linear.