POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
indieweb.org
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Therefore, recently people have been writing threads with a link to post at end of thread. The reason simply is that platforms want people to remain on the platform for longer periods of time.
Instagram doesn't even allow you to have a link in your post. Just in the profile.
You described the solution yourself. You can still do POSSE, but instead of a link you can write something like, "link to original post is in the comments" or "originally published on my website, you know how to find it".
It may be tricky or even impossible to automate, but isn't that how you know it's good, according to PG? :)
Without legislation, these platforms can build walls easier than we can build ladders. Your average user isn’t all that interested in following links in the first place, so it’s an uphill battle from every angle.
Though it's hard for me to imagine legislation helping the situation, since regulations are usually written for/by the big incumbents to dig a deeper moat around themselves.
I don't think that works. People are already lazy to click a link, imagine having to go to the blog and then search for the actual post
(Not that I have a better answer to Twitter's isolationist shenanigans, mind.)
Of course, this also requires content engaging enough to create that reaction...
Pinterest banned my account the other day by mistake and it took me two weeks of pestering the shit out of them for them to admit it and reinstate it.
We need to tell our legislators to go after companies that disallow or downrank external links.
Huh - is this true? It anecdotally felt very true to me when posting content - is there data/reports on this somewhere to view?
Also, you can see how many times a tweet was viewed and interacted with in the analytics, so you could try to do your own comparison by seeing the % of views that trigger engagement
Would I have been saved from that if using their API to post from my site? Well... no, their API is also in a things-change-all-the-time state. Plus I'd have to have a lot more logic in my site build system to handle failure modes in a way that wouldn't spam their system.
And realistically, given the huge portion of us that are using brid.gy for the POSSE we do, that's an external dependency that makes POSSE at least as Theoretically Problematic as PESOS in some large percentage of its real-world use.
If the value of the integration really relies on having the content in both places, I'm dependent either way. (How many people get readers of their single-Tweet-on-a-page microblogs when they're not integrated with Twitter or Mastodon?)
I like the idea of Absolute Control, but once you actually dig into the value that POSSE or PESOS gives when you're using it for more than a "Here's my blog post about my blog's technical stack" usecase... you realize it's still dependency on the whims of some other site's policies (RIP Instagram POSSE) in order to engage with your readers/audience/community there. As long as you want that engagement, you have that dependency. That's okay! If it were about Total Purity, we'd all be running Gopher servers on Raspberry Pis or something.
Definitely got that prediction wrong.
However Zuckerberg could not allow his lusers to rank content, so they added som opaque algorithm to serve whatever they wanted us to see instead.
I have not used Twitter to any extent, but have they done something similar?
We didn't make the message less noisy to fit into 140 chars, we just removed most of the substance to make it fit.
I'm thinking about the people who have no idea how to register a domain name, find hosting, etc. let alone federate their content to various social media services, so instead they use FB / Twitter / etc. as a substitute.
What (paid, non-ad-supported) services offer POSSE but take care of everything for you?
buffer.com
The tricky part here is the quality of the posts will be bad. Each social network has its own social mores and taboos. Some examples:
Fediverse you refer to Twitter as "birdsite". Anything automated here, unless explicitly called out as a bot account, tends to get ignored as low quality.
Facebook does posts in long-form.
Twitter can thread it to be long-form, but each tweet needs to stand on its own with contributing to the overall narrative. Basic pagination type of splitting sticks out.
LinkedIn... I don't know anyone who posts there that isn't trying to artificially puff themselves up in corporate culture, promote their product/service, or some combination. I'm truly unsure what a "quality" post on there looks like, so go wild.
Basically, posting "<post-title> (<link>)" is probably the most ubiquitous, low effort ways of cross-posting your content but... it's pretty universally understood that it's low quality content and not likely to accomplish the originally intended syndication.
EDIT: I was wrong about Medium. They sunset that a couple years ago. You can use their import tool explicitly, or manually copy your post in and set a canonical link to your blog. That sucks.
Anyway:
- for a full service see, for example, https://withknown.com/
- for WordPress plugins: https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Plugins#POSSE_Plugins
- one can also use services like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc to do this, see https://indieweb.org/2020/West/webmentions-and-automation for more
- there's https://brid.gy/about#publishing
... aand a lot more.
It's the perennial tradeoff: do you want reach or ownership. Of course, you want both, but getting reach from your own site takes effort, time or money (or all three). Platforms like Twitter, etc, allow you to leverage their reach, but then take ownership of the content (at least the form of content you put on their site, which may include excerpts or links or user click data).
Like they can't add IPFS or dapp code to any of these?
I recently deleted some things on medium that I wrote years ago and had zero trouble doing it. Try that in some arrangement where you really grant ‘ownership’. “Hello Microsoft, would you please remove the background animation from the BSOD”.
What is really more of a technical detail, the domain name of the site serving some content, seems to take on outsized importance for some people. As far as I can tell, this are not actual creators of content of the sort where it would start being lucrative to swindle them out of ownership.
Case in point: AMP. If Google had, from the beginning, made it possible for AMP content to be served from the publisher’s (sub)domain, opposition on HN would have likely been half as fierce, or less. As we now know with some certainty, AMP really was a ploy to screw over the competition. It’s quite excellent that it failed, but it did so mostly due to people falsely believing they are getting screwed over due to this implementation detail, when really it was competing ad networks who were getting the wrong end of the stick, but wouldn’t have been in any position to stop it except anti-trust litigation.