Why I Built a Social Feed Into a Writing Tool
Fri May 15
Foundational series, post 2 of 5.
Every time I explain what InterlinedList is, I get a version of the same question.
Why does a writing tool have a social feed?
It's a fair question. The tools people actually use for structured writing — Obsidian, Notion, Craft, iA Writer — are private by default. You write in them. The output goes somewhere else. A social feed is, by most definitions, the opposite of that: public by default, real-time, audience-facing.
Putting them in the same product looks like either a confused product decision or a marketing feature.
It's neither.
The Problem with Private-Only Writing Tools
Private writing tools are excellent for the writer. No audience pressure. Drafts handled gracefully. Think slowly, revise freely.
But they create a publication problem the moment you want to share anything.
You leave the tool. You copy the text into a publishing platform, paste it into an email, post it as a tweet. The source and the published version immediately diverge. You have no record of what was published where, or whether it's changed since. And there's no feed for anyone to follow — if someone reads one of your posts and finds it valuable, there's no path back. No subscription mechanic. No discovery. You publish into the void, and the audience has nowhere to return to.
That's not a workflow problem you solve with discipline. It's a structural gap.
The Problem with Social-Only Publishing
Social platforms solve the audience problem. Feeds, follow mechanics, discovery. Someone reads one of your posts, follows you, sees the next one.
But they're terrible writing environments. No real drafting layer — or if there is, it's rudimentary. No series management, no entry linking, no research layer, no Markdown export. The workflow is: write, immediately publish. Shallow by design.
A writer maintaining any serious body of work — a multi-part technical series, a year of observations that build on each other, a collection of posts that compound toward a central argument — can't do that in a social publishing tool. The surface is too thin.
So you end up with two tools that don't talk to each other. The writing environment and the publishing environment, connected only by copy-paste. Every update requires manually keeping two places in sync. It's the kind of friction that doesn't feel catastrophic at first and then quietly kills writing habits over time.
What the Feed Actually Adds
The feed in InterlinedList isn't a separate product bolted onto a writing tool. It's the public output layer of the interlined corpus.
What that means in practice:
Everything you publish is immediately live to an audience. No copy-paste, no reformatting for a different platform, no second tool to open. The step between "done writing" and "public" is one stage change.
The feed gives the writing a permanent home. When you link to an entry from a social post, a newsletter, a comment thread — that link goes to your InterlinedList profile, where readers find the related entries, the series context, everything else you've written. The feed is the public face of the corpus.
The feed creates pressure to actually publish. Private tools don't push you to publish. A social feed does — not because it's demanding, but because the audience is real. Knowing what you write can go directly to a live feed lowers the friction between drafting and publishing considerably. That friction is where writing goes to die.
Feed reactions give you signal. "I Dig!" reactions and reply threads tell you which pieces landed and what questions they raised. That feeds back into the writing — informs what to write next, what to expand, where the gaps are in the series arc. A private writing tool has no feedback loop. The feed creates one.
The Three Roles
I think about InterlinedList as a tool for three roles: collector, writer, and creator.
The collector gathers raw material. The writer develops it into structured drafts. The creator takes the finished work to an audience.
Most writing tools stop at the writer. Excellent for the first two roles, invisible for the third. So a writer who also cares about reaching an audience ends up maintaining two separate workflows in two separate tools — and the connection between them is always manual.
The feed is how InterlinedList serves the creator. It's the distribution layer that sits directly on top of the writing layer with no gap between them.
And because the feed connects to cross-platform syndication — Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn — the creator isn't limited to the InterlinedList audience alone. A single published entry can reach four audiences simultaneously from the same environment where it was drafted.
Why It Belongs Together
The argument against combining a writing tool with a social feed usually goes: they serve different purposes, different design constraints, keeping them separate keeps both focused.
That argument makes sense if you assume writing and publishing are fundamentally separate activities.
I don't think they are. Or at least — I don't think they should be.
Writing that never reaches an audience is a private exercise. Publishing without a writing workflow is performance without depth. The interesting work lives at the intersection: structured, revisable, linked writing that can go public when it's ready, stay connected to its source after it does, and accumulate into a body of work that compounds in value over time.
That's why the feed is in the writing tool.
Not a compromise. Not a marketing feature. Because the writing and the publishing belong together, and separating them is the thing that creates friction — not the thing that solves it.
Next post in this series covers what you can actually do before you pay anything. Spoiler: it's more than most tools give you for free.
— Adron