headshed.dev/share-lt, but what is it?

headshed.dev/share-lt, deriving from the phrase ‘share light’, and meaning for it to be easy and having a lightness about the activity of sharing thoughts, ideas, content online in the modern age. I grew up watching the Jetsons and cannot understand to this day why I can’t drive to work in a rocket car that takes flight!

Unfortunately, science fiction has not yet fully caught up with science fact at least in some areas of modern life. Publishing content online, I believe, has been made easy so long as we give over our intellectual property and otherwise commercial ownership to others in return for our using someone else’s social platform.

headshed.dev’s share-lt is designed to do the same but with a fundamental difference.

You post your ideas using share-lt and you still own it

*So if this wonderful gizmo exists, where is it and how do I get my grubby mitts on it ? *

At the moment we’re running in ‘private beta’ within which a number of our customers and colleagues are running their own instance of share-lt, which we manage for them. For the most part they are each running their own private ‘content management system’ similar in nature to the way other solutions like it work right now, such as WordPress or Wix, takes your pick. The difference we believe and have confirmed with our users is this:

Simplicity of form and function.

The reason we think that more people do not use solutions like the above that are there already (and in the case of WordPress,for example take up, it has been said, the mind share of over 50% of the internet), is that these platforms, whilst perfectly engineered, are quite over engineered or have far too much complexity for the average use case. This can result in some users experiencing ‘writers block’ or not publishing content due to thinking more about the software than actualy writing copy.

The average use case is where social media has stepped in, providing a super easy to use service whilst they subsequently take ownership of what once was ‘our data’, having made it ‘simple and easy’ to share our thoughts and ideas online.

At this time, the current stage of development for share-lt is an easy to use, clutter free content management application that stores a variety of content to be published, and that can be held in a yet to be published ‘preview’ state and viewed using a private, password protected web site.

You, the owner and administrator, can choose to publish changes or additions to the site when you’re ready and happy with the latest version.

We have multiple user accounts that can be given different permissions, so you can give some users ultimate or ‘super user’ access who can do anything, or others that can just create new content but who cannot publish these to the wild, wild internet.

Then, you, the site ‘owner’ can approve and publish these changes with a few clicks on your mobile device or on a laptop / desktop of your choice. Its a web application when all told, so you can get to it from anywhere you have internet access. Whilst this initial working version is all very nice, it only solves a few problems we see with the current state of affairs with social media and the internets.

Hence on our roadmap we have a few things, in no particular order or precedence but including:

• automated posting to social media platforms where it is possible to do so (*)
• AI generated content for things like social media cross posts, based upon your current post content or using other source materials already created within ‘share-lt’
• ‘local first’ app to share, like and comment on posts similar to the way twitter(X), facebook or instagram work currently
• developer integration for inclusion of custom templates, opening up the platform to completely ‘bespoke design’, if the ‘default’ of share-lt is something you want to have customised
• a ‘self hosted’ option that allows you to download the software and run it yourself - which could be an option if you’re like us, devops, technically savvy and happy to do so. We plan to publish this under an MIT license
• any other ideas you come up with and we can deliver that may help in the battle to take control of our content online

If you’re interested in participating in our early ‘private beta’ testing, feel free to contact us on social media or email us direct at :

info@headshed.dev

Else, check back in here at missivz or headshed.dev to see when this becomes a publicly available service

(*) some platforms do not have an ‘API’ ( an application program interface ) meaning that you cannot integrate other application and platforms like IFFT, hootsuite or similar, let alone share-lt. An example of this being, for now at least, substack that requires for you to have to be logged into their app in order to use their platform. Nice if you don’t mind but to cross post to platforms in this category you need to do this the old ‘cut and paste’ way, or type your precious content into their platform using their website only.

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Thanks for reading this article. If you found this of interest you may find others in this, a four part trilogy of :

• Your identity online and who has control over it ?
• share-lt, but what is it?
• filter-lt but what is it ?
• finance and digital autonomy