We’ve been working incredibly hard to fine-tune our communities and how they interoperate. I’m excited to announce we’re re-opening platforms like Twitter, Telegram, & Matrix as ‘Techlore Feeds’ 
I’m giving a lot of information in this post, just expand the two hidden sections for all the details. Otherwise, just skip ahead to the takeaways 
A Lot of Details & History
History
Techlore’s had a ridiculous number of platforms throughout the last 5+ years. Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Telegram, Matrix, Minds, DTube, Bitchute, Reddit, Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, TikTok, etc. My job is to decide which platforms make the most sense given our target audience. I have to balance moderation, time, interoperability, barrier to entry, difficulty to manage, and the value a platform provides to both our audience and Techlore. It’s never an easy decision to create a platform, and it’s never easy to delete one!
Recent Problems
Recently, I realized the messiness of Techlore’s digital presence…
- ‘Why was Mastodon getting announcements for Topic A but YouTube Topic B?’
- ‘Why was our forum receiving updates our Discord community was unable to receive?’
- ‘Why was Reddit only posting new Techlore videos and nothing else we do?’
Every platform was standing on its own two feet, receiving its own individual experience that didn’t align with the others. This isn’t to say every platform needs to be identical, as platforms all have pros/cons we can use to personalize the experience. But the lack of consistency went well beyond that, where it felt I was violating the goal of making privacy simple & accessible.
How To Fix Crazy
To start, I had to plot out every platform Techlore was active on and create a flow chart to visually see what was happening. The chart you see above is the infinitely more organized chart after spending hours processing exactly what was being posted on each platform. After analyzing our workflow, I started grouping platforms into two general buckets: Original Content & Feeds
Original Content are platforms where something is created for the first time. On YouTube this is a new video. On Patreon this is a new post. On our forum these are posts both the community and ourselves create. Unfortunately, I’ve been extending the concept of Original Content into every platform, under the false impression it’s both good and realistic to give all platforms their own original content. For example, if I post a video on YouTube, that’s original content and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if I do a manual post to our forum for the video, that’s a tiny bit of time/effort that blurs the line between Original Content & Feeds - then imagine repeating this for all our other platforms! If we had more team-members and funding this wouldn’t be an issue, but this is a massive time drain given the frequency we upload, and we’re not in a privileged enough position to give individual attention to every platform. (yet)
Fortunately, this realization allowed me to shift away from ‘every platform is original content’ to just YouTube, Patreon, our Forum, and Substack. My goal is to publish a video on YouTube, publish updates to Patreon, and manage our forum; from there all other platforms magically manage themselves. And sneak peek…it’s now magic 
Takeaways
From here on out, the following platforms are where we’re posting Original Content:
- YouTube (by extension Odysee & PeerTube for only video content given they auto sync videos)
- Patreon
- Forum
- Substack
The following platforms are Feeds, designed to give you a consistent feed of Original Content. The goal is for every platform below to push exactly the same updates so we can extend our work universally despite what platforms you choose to use.
*Note: Discord has the Techlore feed integrated into the #feed channel alongside standard community features
Pros, Cons, and Why We're Doing This
This is wonderful because:
- I don’t have to spend time creating posts on every platform, meaning more time used for original content!
- You will get a coherent feed on any platform of your choice. Just because you delete Twitter won’t mean you’re missing anything exclusive from us.
- If any platform screws its users (cough Reddit cough) we won’t be a reason you feel tied down to the platform.
- We can support more platforms! Since these are essentially read-only communities (with the exception of Discord), we don’t have to moderate them! It’s this reason Telegram & Matrix have returned from the grave in read-only feed mode. I know it isn’t a community, but I’m happy to at least try and offer updates to those of you using those platforms.
The main drawback is platforms will be less personal. Feeds will never 100% match a platform given individual attention. But this is a matter of priorities - I want to focus more of my already limited time into the platforms I feel matter most for Techlore and our audience.
In summary, every Techlore platform is now either Original Content or a Feed
Follow any of our feeds below to keep up with Techlore, our announcements, & other privacy updates:
*Note: We don’t yet host this centralized ‘feed’ via RSS directly. However, you can directly subscribe to our Mastodon via RSS which should give you the exact same experience as us hosting our own RSS feed 
Update: If any of you have any platforms you’d like to see added as feeds, just let us know below so we can explore adding it. Can’t promise, but we’ll look into it.
