Of course you already know what a hashtag is. But did you know you can do some cool stuff with them on Mastodon? Like feature them on your profile or use them to create alternative timelines?

Hashtags are great to stay on top of certain topics. You can search for them from your Mastodon sidebar or app. And of course you can click on any hashtag in your timeline.

From there you'll get beamed to the list view of that hashtag, giving you some nice information about the hashtag where you can see how frequently it is used:

Below that you'll see the most recent posts using this hashtag. And of course you already spotted that prominent "Follow hashtag" button.

As soon as you follow a hashtag you'll see it in the sidebar on the right, where you can easily access it and see the matching posts:

But you will also notice, that new posts of people you don't follow will appear in your timeline. Those are posts with the hashtags you follow and they will be marked as that.

This way you can stay up to date with the topics you love and can easily follow other users using those hashtags.

And as a little bonus tip: when you are posting yourself and use certain hashtags frequently, you can feature them! On the hashtag list view, click the three little dots and add the hashtag to your featured tags:

Those will appear in your profile so visitors can quickly see what topics you are into:

And by the way! Did you know that Sociabli transfers the hashtags you use on Mastodon and cross posts them to Bluesky? This way your posts will be listed everywhere using the same hashtags. Neat, isn't it?

This is what it looks like on Mastodon:

As you can see the shared link has some additional information at the bottom, showing the author. This will only be shown when you activate this feature and only for defined websites. As a bonus readers can hover over your name and start following you.

The setup is quite easy.

Open you Mastodon instance in a browser and head over to your profile settings under:

Preferences -> Public Profile -> Verification

Here you can see a code snippet you have to add to your website. In our case this would be:

<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@sociabli@mastodon.social">

Put this in your websites . Of course you have to change it to your user handle.

Next you can define a list of website which are allowed to credit you. This prevents me from adding your author tag to impersonate you.

It may take a while until everything is set on your instance. Once everything is ready you can start sharing links and will see author attributions as soon as you share something from a connected website.

The cool thing is: When you use Sociabli for cross posting, this information still will be shown, as it is saved directly in your account!

No, it's now Mastodon feature by know, which would be cool. But there are Starterkits provided by Fedidevs which serve the same purpose.

Under https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/ you can see existing Starterpacks. So you may want to take some time and scroll a bit. Of course you can also search for topics you are interested in. Once you selected one of those packs, you can follow the accounts included. For that you have to authorize Fedidevs to follow accounts on your behalve.

As soon as you authorized them, you can follow accounts on those Starterpacks. And that's a main difference to Mastodon lists, where you have a certain timeline for those accounts. So you may want to fine tune your home timeline afterwards, by unfollowing certain accounts.

Of course you could also go through the list of accounts of a Starterpack and follow only the accounts you are interested in.

Even though this solution isn't as elegant as the Bluesky approach it is a good starting point for new users. And if you like, you can create your own Starterpacks to give new users some guidance.

Oh, by the way. If it is a bit too much for you to manage your Mastodon posts and your Bluesky posts and keep everything in sync. Simply use Sociabli to cross post from one to the other and keep the focus on your favorite network. Simple as that.

If you are like us, you may be interested in a wide variety of topics, from nodejs developement over podcasting to norwegian literature. But having everything in one timeline may not be what you want. After work is done you want to read about Knausgård and Fosse and not about performance issues in nodejs microservices.

Mastodon is here to help!

You may remember those twitter lists you had, where you could add accounts to which you didn't want to follow but still read from time to time. It works a bit different on Mastodon, but you can still achive the same result.

So with Mastodon you can create lists and see those lists as different timelines. Some apps even allow you to switch the default Mastodon timeline to one of your lists. So this feature might be pretty powerful if you use Mastodon intensely.

The big difference to twitter is that you have to follow an account to put it on a list:

And as soon as you follow the user to add him/her to the list, the user will also be visible on your default timeline. So what's the solution here? We'll show you.

Let's start by creating a new list.

Open your instance and click on "Lists" in the sidebar on the right side. Click the plus button on the top:

A new page will be openend where you can set the name of your list and set what kind of posts you want to see. Maybe you don't want so see boosts on your list but only original content. And there is also this magical toggle!

"Hide members in Home" is where the magic happens. So even though you have to follow each member of the list, you can hide their posts from your default timeline! This way you can use lists to build custom timelines without getting a mixed up home timeline.

Oh, by the way! Of course we are on Mastodon, too. Maybe add us to one of your new lists? We would be happy to connect!

Here’s a peek under the hood.

🧱 Frontend: TypeScript + React + Clerk

Our frontend is built using TypeScript and React, giving us both reliability and flexibility. We use the Material UI framework for a clean, responsive, and consistent interface.

For authentication and authorization, we rely on Clerk, which lets us handle users, sessions, and secure access logic without reinventing the wheel.

We deploy the frontend to Netlify, where we also use Netlify Functions to abstract the connection to our workflow engine. This keeps the client app decoupled from execution logic and ensures smooth performance even with dynamic user interactions.

⚙️ Workflow Engine: Self-Hosted n8n

At the heart of Sociabli’s automation lies a self-hosted n8n instance. It listens for triggers (like new posts in RSS feeds) and executes workflows based on user configurations.

Every automation—from post routing to scheduling—is executed inside this dedicated engine, giving us full control and flexibility, without locking into a SaaS provider.

🗃️ Storage: From SQLite to Supabase

We started light with a local SQLite database. However, after experiencing file corruption, we migrated to Supabase—a hosted PostgreSQL solution that offers powerful real-time capabilities, easy scaling, and peace of mind. Supabase now holds workflow metadata, and app configuration in a reliable and structured way.

💾 Backup Strategy: Git + n8n

Backups are part of the core system, not an afterthought. Every night, our workflow engine runs a backup process that commits user workflows as versioned Git commits. This gives us not just recovery options, but also workflow history tracking.

📝 Add-on: The Blog as Code

Our blog lives in a headless CMS, which exposes articles via RSS. We use Eleventy (11ty.dev)—a fast and elegant static site generator—to build the blog pages. These static files are deployed directly through Netlify’s build pipeline, ensuring minimal latency and maximum reliability for our content delivery.

Why This Stack?

We chose these tools not because they’re trendy, but because they’re:

• Modular — Each part can evolve independently
• Open — We prioritize open-source, transparent technology
• Minimal but powerful — Just enough tooling to solve the problem, nothing more

Sociabli is designed to be lightweight and sustainable. With this stack, we can move fast, iterate safely, and stay in full control of our platform.

We all know those blue verification badges on mostly all of those platforms and services out there. Well, there is none on Mastodon. In the recent years those badges became more of a status badge than a verification badge. You could only get them when you were "famous" or when you waved with your credit card. So why care at all?

The original idea behind those badges is a good one. It's a badge to make clear: this is really me! So why is it missing on Mastodon?

First things first: you can verify on Mastodon. It just works differently. What is a verification badge worth if you can buy it without being verified as intended? On mastodon you can verify yourself pretty easy.

The best way to do is, is to have and use a personal website. There are other solutions, but in our optinions this is the best way.

For that go to preferences -> public profile -> verification
You'll be presented with a small code snippet, which looks something like this:

"me" href="https://mastodon.social/@sociabli">Mastodon

You simply have to add this somewhere on your website. You can use it to link to your Mastodon account in the footer, for example. But you can add it to any link to your Mastodon profile. The important part is rel="me".

As soon as you added this link to your website, you can head over to your Mastodon profile under: preferences -> public profile -> edit

Here you can add extra fields. Fill in a label and paste in the URL of your site, like this:

Mastodon will now visit your site and look for that link from above. As soon as it finds it, Mastodon knows that this is really you and will mark that URL as verified.

This way people can make sure you are really the person you pretend to be. You can also add other services like GitHub for example. This may add even more trust.

By the way! When authorizing Sociabli to cross post for you, we set the permission in a way, that we cannot alter your profile as we don't want to invade sensible information like the one described above.

How Bluesky Connections Work in Sociabli

In Sociabli, everything starts with connections.

A workflow consists of two connections:

• One as the post origin (where your post comes from)
• One as the post target (where your post gets published)

To use Bluesky as a target (or even an origin), you need to add an app password to your connection.

Creating Your Bluesky App Password

1. Open Bluesky

   Head over to https://bsky.app

2. Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → App Passwords

   You can jump directly using this link:

   👉 App Password Settings

3. Click "Add App Password"

   You'll find this button in the App Passwords section.

4. Name Your Password

   Enter a name like Sociabli Connection.

   ⚠️ Leave the checkbox unchecked. This ensures it's a limited-scope password.

5. Copy the Generated Password

   Bluesky will show something like: mdrz-3lct-fmp3-sa6l

   Copy it immediately—you won’t be able to see it again later.

6. Paste it into Sociabli

   In your Bluesky connection setup inside Sociabli, paste this app password when prompted.

🎉 That’s it! You’re all set to use Bluesky in your Sociabli workflows.

Need help or ran into an issue? Drop us a line—Sociabli support is happy to help you get connected.

We do not, and will not, support X (formerly Twitter).

It’s Not Just a Technical Choice—It’s a Values-Based One

We’re developers. But before that, we’re people—people who believe in democracy, human dignity, facts, and open dialogue.

The communities we serve and the tools we build are guided by values like:

• Respect and appreciation for others
• Honesty and accountability in communication
• A commitment to digital spaces that bring people together—not tear them apart

Unfortunately, X no longer aligns with these principles.

A Platform in Decline

What once was a vibrant space for discourse and connection has become a place increasingly overrun by hate speech, disinformation, and right-wing extremism. This shift isn’t accidental—it’s enabled and even amplified by the platform’s new direction. We’re not alone in seeing this change. Researchers, journalists, and civil society groups have consistently reported on the rising toxicity and declining safeguards on X.

We Do Not Support Elon Musk’s Vision

The current leadership of X has repeatedly shown disregard for platform responsibility, journalistic freedom, and democratic norms. From enabling misinformation to reinstating banned hate accounts, the actions taken under Elon Musk’s ownership stand in direct conflict with what we believe in as creators and developers.

So, let’s be clear:

We don’t support X because we don’t support what it’s become—and we don’t support the person driving it.

Not Everyone Is Welcome Here

We understand this might be a dealbreaker for some potential users. And we’re okay with that.

Not everyone can use Sociabli.

That’s a conscious design decision. We invite you to read our FAQ to understand why, and to learn more about our content and platform policies.

Final Thoughts

Sociabli exists to make sharing easier and more ethical. But we’ll never trade our values for reach. If you’re someone who believes in creating meaningful, respectful content—we built this for you. If not, we kindly point you elsewhere.

We all had that moment when we wanted to create our first Mastodon account and then had to decide which instance to use. Instance? What the?! What does that even mean? Why do I have to choose?

Good news first: you can simply choose one of the popular instances like mastodon.social or mastodon.online and you'll be fine. But you may have a better experience when you take your time and select another one.

The first thing you have to know is that Mastodon is not like Twitter or Threads or all those other platforms. Mastodon is not a platform or a service; it's more of a software.

And as with most software, you can install Mastodon on different computers. There is no such thing as "The Firefox" where you go to and log in and have your browser account. You download Firefox on your computer and install it.

That's what can be done with Mastodon. Well, it's a bit more complicated as the software is pretty complex, and therefore most people won't do that—but you could.

And there are plenty of people installing Mastodon on their servers. And each of those installations is a Mastodon instance! There are public ones where everybody can create an account, and there are private ones.

There are general instances like the ones mentioned above. Everybody can create an account and start posting. And there are instances related to a certain topic. You can create an account and start posting on most of them, but some of them want to make sure you really wish to post about that topic. In that case you can register your account but have to wait until it's approved.

Why?

But why care? Because on Mastodon there are different timelines. There is your home timeline consisting of people you follow, and there is a timeline for your instance where you can see the most recent posts of all members of your instance.

And here it gets interesting. Let's say you are interested in poetry and you joined an instance focused on that topic; you can be pretty sure that most of the posts on the instance timeline are about poetry! The same with hashtags.

Most topic-related instances are smaller than the general ones. So by joining them, you surround yourself with like-minded people, making it easier to connect and find interesting posts you really care about.

Moving

So you may think that you made a mistake choosing a certain instance, and you would better fit into another one. That's no problem. Mastodon allows you to move your account from one instance to another, taking with you your followers and followings.

Therefore, choose your instance, and if you don't feel at home there, don't worry, you can move to another one any time.

By the way. When cross posting with Sociabli we cannot detect when you moved your instances. You may need to log in and add a new connection. We'll then continue cross-posting with the new one.

We thought: What if sharing the content we publish from our blogs into social media could be as fluid as writing one message?

That’s why we built Sociabli.

Our mission is to take the friction out of crossposting. We help you connect your favorite platforms into clear, reusable workflows—so you can publish once and let Sociabli handle the rest. No bloated dashboards. No complex automation rules. Just fast, reliable tools that respect your time and your voice.

We believe that great content deserves great distribution—and that creators should stay in control, not get buried under social media busywork. By crafting this tool to save time for ourself, we want you – the makers, the communicators – to have it radically easier to share your content with the world.

Take an account like the one by our developer Maurice. Maurice posts ins two languages: German and English. Most of the time his posts are in english but from time to time he writes a german one. In case you are not speaking german this may be a bit annoying, you probably don't want to translate or even see those posts.

No worries, Mastodon has a feature helping. First of all: all users can set the languages they are posting in. Let's stay with Maurice as an example. When he's about to post something he can select the language of his post:

So when Maurice posts in German he can select this language. Now you can filter out those German posts!

For that you simply open up the profile of a user and click the three dots next to the follow/unfollow button. There you'll find the point "Change subscribed languages":

Clicking it will show all the languages the user is posting in. You can now select one or more of them and in the future you will only see posts in those languages:

So in our example, you would only select English and will not see any posts written in German.

And you can go even further. In your preferences go to "Other". There you can select languages you want to see on public timelines.

Now you can following multi languages accounts without having your timeline full of languages you don't understand.

By the way! When you're cross posting with Sociabli, we transfer those language settings. So when Maurice posts in German on Mastodon, his cross posted Bluesky post will also be set to German. Pretty cool, isn't it?

In early 2024, Mark launched a personal blog called YADL, a space to think out loud about technology, tools, and the quiet craft of building meaningful software.

The technical foundation for the blog was Kirby CMS, a lightweight, flat-file content management system. What made it particularly powerful was the IndieConnector plugin, which added a touch of magic: whenever a blog post was published, it automatically generated a Mastodon post using the article's title, intro text, and Open Graph image, with a direct link to the full post.

It was a beautifully minimal solution. Write once, and the content would appear on Mastodon without the overhead of logging into another app or manually crafting another version.

But there was one catch:

What if you wanted to share that same post on Bluesky, or LinkedIn, or even Medium?

Crossposting Shouldn’t Be Complicated

There were no good answers. Every social platform had its own quirks, limitations, and missing APIs. But the problem was clear: crossposting still felt like a chore. And worse, it disrupted the creative flow.

So we started building what we needed. That’s how Sociabli was born:

A service designed to automate and simplify the act of sharing your content across platforms—starting from something you already wrote, already crafted, or already published.

Our first step? Take that Mastodon post and use it as the “source” for new posts elsewhere—beginning with Bluesky and eventually expanding to LinkedIn and Medium.

The Road So Far

• Mastodon to Bluesky: ✅ Supported

  The original use case—reposting blog-based Mastodon updates to Bluesky—is live and working.

• Medium: ❌ On hold

  Unfortunately, Medium removed their public API, which halted our plans for automatic posting. We’re monitoring the situation, but for now, Medium support is postponed.

• LinkedIn: 🛣️ On the roadmap

  We’re actively working on integration with LinkedIn, aiming to bring the same level of automation and ease.

Why Sociabli Exists

Sociabli exists because content creators—bloggers, developers, writers—deserve tools that don’t interrupt their momentum. We didn’t set out to build a social dashboard. We built a workflow: one that fits around your creative process, not on top of it. No bloat. No distractions. Just clean, clear crossposting from origin to destination.

That’s Where Our Mission Started

From a single blog post to a federated post on Mastodon. From Mastodon to Bluesky. And onward, toward a more connected, less cluttered way to share ideas online. We’re just getting started, but we’re building it for people like us:

The quietly ambitious creators who care more about the message than the algorithm.

Hello World! This is our very first blog post and we're planning to publish a lot more. We will write about Mastodon, Bluesky, all the other platforms and services out there, and of course about new features and news around Sociabli. 🥳