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I keep reading about how complicated it has become to build and launch a simple website. Countless frameworks, bloated CMSs, and complicated deployments. My colleague and I decided to get his new website online as quickly as possible.

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Mark ist seit 17 Jahren Full-Stack-Entwickler mit einer Leidenschaft für Event-Driven Architekturen. Er gründete ein Startup und hat eine eigene kleine Agentur. Er spielt Tischtennis und Rollenspiele.

At konzentrik, we love to build small and large, useful tools and services designed to make life easier for us and many others. But what’s the point of all that development if no one knows about it?

On my own website, I’ve defined a thematic focus I rarely stray from. Many of our tools have only sporadically fit into this context (like our Crossposter). I pondered for quite some time how to change that.

As I embarked on building websites, layouts were still being created with tables, and design possibilities were limited. Animated GIFs were the highlight of every website. If one wanted a button to change color when hovered over, two images would be created and swapped - that was then.

I worked as a traditional web freelancer for many years, creating countless websites for agencies and private clients. Don't worry; I no longer used tables back then, but instead opted for CSS.

The main goal of this version was to make IndieConnector independent from external services. Therefore, I wanted to start by detaching IndieConnector from webmention.io in the first step.

I quickly fell down the rabbit hole into Webmentions, as one might expect. Unlike what I initially thought, receiving Webmentions is not just about listening for a request and processing it.

A few months ago, I published an article on crossposting from Mastodon to Bluesky in the Hub. Since then, it's been the most frequently visited article.

Crossposting is about posting something on Mastodon and having that post automatically published on Bluesky as well. Because Bluesky has another character limit than Mastodon, the tool will split up long posts and create threads on Bluesky. The tool was built as a NodeJs script.

For many people, implementing this is too complicated or they don't have the possibility of running a NodeJs scripts or Docker images. Very few hosters offer these possibilities.

I've been thinking about this topic for some time now and, aside from other features that would be great, I've had my eye on the central goal of making it even easier to use. This includes signing up via Mastodon, entering Bluesky credentials without a .env file, etc.