Migrating my microblog publishing from Pinboard to Raindrop.io

For the past 12 years, following the demise of Google Reader Social, I have used Pinboard (see also) as a core part of my obscure microblog commentary on Twitter, App.net, and Mastodon.  My posts have 3 fields: Title, Link, and Comment. On iOS I use the Pins.app Share Sheet for data entry, optionally edit in Pins.app, and the result is initially published in Pinboard. On the desktop I use a Pinboard bookmarklet to author and I edit in Pinboard.

IFTTT processes the Pinboard RSS feed and posts to my Mastodon instance (via web hook) and to my WordPress blog (kateva.org/sh). Although anyone can follow these posts via RSS from Pinboard or Mastodon or Kateva.org the small number who see them are likely following me on Mastodon. Mostly the posts are for Emily's interests and for my memory. I don't share them to my BlueSky account but I may do a future subset.

It's a kludgy and sometimes fragile workflow but I'm used to it. Alas Pinboard has been in decline for a year or so and around August 2024 it basically died. Maciej Cegłowski has since resurfaced but the service has been up and down and he's been generally unresponsive.

I have identified two replacements: micro.blog and raindrop.io. I chose Raindrop.io as most similar to my prior workflow but micro.blog is my next step.

Today I exported my pinboard content as a JSON feed (52K posts, of which the first few thousand were exports from Google Reader Social) and imported into Raindrop.io with good results. I signed up for the Raindrop.io monthly plan while I see what I can put together. I'll update this post with what I learn.

During this transition there will be some noisiness. Today I forgot to turn off my IFTTT feed and my raindrop.io import started generating kateva.org/sh entries that I had to remove. Eventually I'll remove the Pinboard content and close that account.

I'll update this post with what I learn.

Update 1/6/2025: Things are not looking good

Problems so far:

• Raindrop.io is deprecating RSS features in favor of an API approach and IFTTT integration. But the integration I want is buggy (can't handle URL even though it works with RSS integration) and the mastodon integration is only for one very large instance.
• Raindrop.io fetches a screenshot of the bookmark source to save as persistent artifact. It includes that in RSS as a img tag. For my purposes this is ugly noise in the post.
• Creating a Raindrop.io post from the desktop browser bookmarklet doesn't work well.

I've put in a support request to the Raindrop.io dev but I suspect I'll need to cancel my $3/m subscription. I'll revert back to Pinboard if it's functional again. Next will be a micro.blog evaluation and perhaps publishing in Mastodon with Linky/bookmarklet then using Mastodon RSS to create a kateva.org/sh archive entry.

Using IFTTT Webhooks to post RSS feed data to Mastodon (requires pro account)

Update 2/19/2024: I did this using my free IFTT account but per IFTT "Starting February 15th, 2024, webhooks Applets will be disconnected for free users". Currently a subscription is $35 a year but of course that may go up.

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Eleven years ago I wrote about using the IFTTT service to create tweets from the RSS feed of my Pinboard shares (which are written for myself and for Emily; there are now over 49,000 entries).  

Back then I was continuing a kind of sharing I started with Google Reader Social (details) and continued with App.net after Social died.

Now Twitter is dying, but, incredibly, Maciej Ceglowski's Pinboard endures. I've migrated to Mastodon (on an instance for veterans of App.net!) so now I use IFTTT (still free for my use) to create mastodon posts tagged #jgshare from that old Pinboard RSS.

I'm writing now to share a bit of how that works. I started with a recipe first published in 2017 and updated in 2022 by KelsonV. That recipe uses IFTTT web hooks: I tweaked it a bit to get the output I wanted:

    Descriptive Title

    URL

    Commentary

The recipe is a bit hard to follow but the key steps are:

1. In Mastodon Profile Preferences Development create an "application" with website "https://ifttt.com/" and Scope of write:statuses. After it's created copy the access token.
2. In IFTTT create a rule based on the RSS feed of your source (in my case Pinboard shares with a particular tag). My rule starts with IF "New Feed Item"
3. The action part of the rule is a web request"
1. URL: https://appdot.net/api/v1/statuses
2. Method: POST
3. Content type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
4. Authorization: Bearer 1234567890 (replace 1234... with your Mastodon access token)
5. Body as below.

KelsonV's post has additional details and screenshots.

The trick in the body was to get line spaces between Title, URL and Commentary. This worked:

status = 

<<<{{EntryTitle}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryUrl}}

>>>

<<<{{EntryContent}}

>>>

#jgshare

When I first ran this I'd get errors in my IFTTT log but the rule worked successfully. The errors went away.