My big project – the Record attempt: Longest train journey in the EU – starts in a week, and I am refining the social media strategy for it. And I need a little bit of feedback from you, my followers!

First of all, a little background about the project.

The project is in 3 phases. The first, from Saturday 29th August until Sunday 6th September is my trip to Kemijärvi in Finland to start the record attempt. The second, from Monday 7th September until Friday 11th September is the record attempt itself – this is really the part that I want people following. And then 12th September until 17th September, and onwards into September is my trip home and various other railway trips.

There are two hashtags already in use for this – #CrossBorderRail which is my generic tag for my international rail work, and #LongestTrainEU for the record attempt.

I have two decisions to make.

1) Until now, the high quantity of the posts from my projects like this have been on Mastodon (@jon@gruene.social)- 14k, with that bridged to Bluesky (@jon.gruene.social.ap.brid.gy). But the bridge has just 1.4k followers, while my regular Bluesky (well Eurosky – I am guarding myself against enshittification) account (@jonworth.eu) has more than 30k. So do I abandon the bridge, and simply post the same content on both Mastodon and Bluesky throughout the project? Abandoning the bridge will simplify conversations – people will just reply using whatever network suits them. But the downside of changing is I will suddenly be filling Bluesky followers’ timelines with a lot more content than before! I lean towards abandoning the bridge and switching to cross posting.

2) Each day of each project before now was a thread on Mastodon, and that could be replaced by a daily thread on both Mastodon and Bluesky (as per point 1 if I cross post). These threads develop across a day, with posts being added to the thread as and when things happen. However on both Mastodon and Bluesky threads do not always display neatly for all users. So I could replace threading posts simply with individual posts, each using the hashtags. Because then users would get the full content of the project by clicking the hashtag. I lean towards keeping the threads, but am open to persuasion to change this.

Above and beyond that there will be some other social media – live videos will still be posted on Peertube, and some edited video material will go on Youtube too. And a few posts will go on LinkedIn to show I am doing Inspirational Thought Leadership™️.

There will also be a Live page about the 7th-11th September section of the project here on this website, including a live GPS position documenting whether the record attempt is proceeding as planned. This page will also aggregate some video content and images from Flickr as well.

(Thanks to Kuba Suder for pointing me towards Indigo for Mac and iOS that would allow me to cross post, and to developers of Indigo Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh for their quick answers to queries. And it was Tony Yates who got me thinking about all of this in the first place. And before any Fediverse ultras complain, yes, I am aware of the issues with Bluesky even when using Eurosky as my PDS. But Eurosky is ethical enough and decentralised enough for my purposes, and I want to reach as many people as possible with my work about railways.)