For years now I kept some of my social accounts alive with a Python script. It read from a collection of RSS feeds and shared at random times. It worked, my feeds stayed active, and people asked me what was I doing reading at 3am.
The script had a bit of personality: it logged out all the time, and tended to share links as simple URLs, no preview. There was no context, no personal take, no small comment that explains why I was sharing this. Although I liked the serendipity of it, whenever I found a really cool article, I preferred to take the long route and curate the post by hand.
I tried Buffer and a few similar tools, but they felt extravagant for something I only do now and then. I don’t share articles for a living, I share them because I believe in elective affinities, that quiet collective pull toward certain ideas. A piece of writing isn’t fully alive until it’s passed from hand to hand. Unshared, it feels like the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it.
So I built EchoTree.
What I like most about it is that it feels proportionate: no subscription tax, no heavy setup, no pressure to become a “content machine.” It’s just a private tool I control, built for thoughtful sharing.
The goal
I wanted a light, intentional workflow:
- read the article in a clean view,
- pick a sentence or summary,
- write a short comment,
- and share now (or schedule).
That meant building:
- a reader mode preview,
- a comment box with a quick summary helper,
- a share-now button,
- a queue for when I want to schedule.
What makes it different (for me)
- Reader and publishing flow in one place.
- Works across X, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Bluesky.
- I can share any URL, not only feed items.
- AI helps draft summaries/comments, but I always decide what actually gets posted.
The scheduled queue ended up being one of my favorite parts: before a post goes out, I can still edit the comment, adjust the time, or switch the networks it will be sent to.
Compared with paid schedulers, EchoTree is intentionally narrower: self-hosted, simpler, and closer to how I actually share things.
How I built it
- PHP + Slim for routing and pages.
- Twig for templates.
- SQLite so it runs anywhere without setup.
- SimplePie + Readability for feeds and reader mode.
I used OpenClaw (when it was called ClawdBot) over WhatsApp while at the gym, which felt very 2026.
Codex 5.2 was behind the scenes. One strategy that worked extremely well was to draft together one Specs and one Tasks document. Specs provided the business needs and Tasks supplied discrete steps to build the application.
Then I wrote “read the specs and implement the tasks one step at a time” and the thing did like 3 days of work in 5 minutes. I’d say the initial product was like 80% finished.
The whole thing lives in a folder and doesn’t need a database server or a queue.
You can find it at https://github.com/danielpradilla/echotree.
