POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
indieweb.org
indieweb.org
That said, posting links to original content tends to get low engagement and is generally disliked on downstream social networks. It is often seen as not really participating in a native social network, instead spamming it for the sake of self-promotion. Even if the link is promising/worthwhile, the UX sucks. As it will be typically be consumed from mobile, it opens an in-app browser, your website loads, possibly with all kinds of distractions like cookie banners or a poor reading experience. Should your link contain yet other links, the experience pretty much breaks down.
Any feedback from downstream systems (likes, comments) are not syndicated back whilst at least for comments they can definitely enrich the content. Unless you have some very sophisticated polling mechanism, that content does not syndicate upwards. Similarly, if you reply to somebody else's content, your reply in a way is also your original content, but it's not preserved on your blog.
Should your link really have a high value, definitely don't expect that people pass down the link in distribution. They'll take quotes and make screenshots and post it natively.
Nitty gritty local cultures matter. On Reddit just posting the link may get you banned. On other networks you need to pay for API access. On Medium, you shouldn't post short form, on Mastodon, you might need a content warning and hashtags.
To handle the feedback of your syndication, you continue to need to deal with every local network personally. Manage their notifications, handle their replies and follow-ups. Your friends/followers are also not syndicated.
When using native social networks directly, people often use multiple personas. The standup professional on LinkedIn, but also the toxic gamer dude on Twitter. Same person, different masks. Or even multiple personas within the same network. Very hard to setup with POSSE.
Say you'd participate in a "#catphotooftheweek" competition that only is a thing on Twitter. You can post it on your blog but it makes no sense there. Syndication should only happen towards Twitter.
Anyway, like I said, better than nothing, but automated syndication often sucks. The content ownership part is the truly important part. You can most definitely consider syndicating manually, in optimal form per social network.
This idea also goes against the "Copies cite the original." approach mentioned in the article. You'd lose view/readership tracking or fragment it.
It does start with a link to his own page, but you can just skip that and keep reading if you want to. I think this is a great approach - if you just want to read the article you can click through, but if you really prefer a long thread you can read that instead, and then easily repost or respond to a particular quote from the thread.
It's true that you lose unified view/readership tracking, but I think that's considered a positive for a lot of people.
However... while my website may not be the hopping, happening thing, it was there when weblogs were the thing, it's been there through Slashdot, it's been there through StumbleOn going up and down, it's been there through MySpace, it's been there through Reddit, it's been there through Facebook, it's been there through Hacker News, it's been there through Mastodon, and it'll be there through the next happening thing, and based on statistics, quite likely outlast it too.
My policy is even a bit more flexible than that. I use social media to tune things, then make them permanent on my website. Often what ends up on my website is just not possible to post on social media, between the formatting I need, the size of the post, and so on.
To me, you're talking about all these short-term disadvantages, but I'm thinking long term, where I'm planning on outlasting all these transient social media services.
(And yeah, I don't get traffic, but to be honest, sometimes just publishing something and getting it out there, without hundreds of anklebiters rushing out to bitch about it, is the way to go.)
A long time ago, when I used Twitter, I used to think like this, but now I see it for what it is: cult mentality. And I have no qualms about offending cultists.
You may have no qualms offending potential readers, but if so you probably aren't the target audience here. Many people in fact try and appeal to potential readers to encourage them to read their work.
The modal indieweb approach is sophisticated internally, but pretty plug-and-play:
brid.gy/
> When using native social networks directly, people often use multiple personas. The standup professional on LinkedIn, but also the toxic gamer dude on Twitter. Same person, different masks. Or even multiple personas within the same network. Very hard to setup with POSSE.
IMO yes/no; "have >1 domain" or two neocities sites or whatever is decently doable for fully separated alt-style stuff. If you want to syndicate from the same source only your toxic gamer stuff to Twitter and your professional stuff to LinkedIn, that... well, that example used to be possible before they killed the Twitter API. I think the technical part here is less difficult than feeling out your own social intent, what you actually want to share in different spaces, rather than letting the product design and app network effects cue you. But maybe anyone this involved in the web should be thinking about it that hard, maybe it'd be better for us to be more reflective, less cued.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but do people on, say, reddit or hacker news general dislike it when people post links to original content on other sites?
POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments)
Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)
My comment on that comment: note that LinkedIn disadvantages content with links. A workaround is to put the links into comments, but you have little control over their prominence.
I'm fairly certain facebook does the same
The automated twitter accounts feel like a fire and forget. And you probably want to eavesdrop the conversation.
This could be AI territory, who's mentioning this? Web mention is a flawed system, but reaches for the right target.
I see people drifting back to Twitter from Mastodon as they crave previous circle interaction. They don't like missing conversation, and comment systems per blog can be sucky.
There is the perspective that social networks are about connecting people, having deliberations, the town square. And then there is the influencer, marketing communication, discoverability, sales funnel, SEO, push perspective.
The syndication perspective in a way frames social networks mostly as the latter. I think this is a pragmatic, realistic view of what social networks have (mostly become), but it is sad. Not sure if AI (as in summarize, aggregate, "sentiment analytics") has much to offer here that is actually meaningful.
Very true. How many times someone asks for recommendations and then does follows up with the recommendation. It is used, at least on twitter, as away to get engagement without any intention of connection.
This is the stuff you don't need for the conversation. Maybe once more the IndieWeb and the ActivityPub-based Fediverse should try to meet each other. On the Fediverse conversations and town squares are what you get (to the frustration of some Twitter migrants, I should add).
For example, I moved Medium posts to my blog (https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2022/12/new-blog-from-medium-to-gri...) - as well as archived some "evergreen" FB posts.
Editing to add: I see that they linked to COPE in the See Also section, although the Programmable Web link is broken (irony upon irony!). NPR still has a version up, fortunately.[1]
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/inside/2009/02/clean_content_po...
I keep a master and am judicious with who is allowed to change it. And I like lots of replicas (hopefully with some registration to know about use) that can sync and derive products that selectively sync with updates or are pinned to a release.
I think this fits into the splitter vs lumper philosophy where things are separated off and handled independently with clear interdependencies rather than lump everything together into a single issue to be solved overall.
This means I don’t need to fix all the problems in the replicas of my data in order to go about my work or life.
A tip for anybody building POSSE systems: OpenGraph images make a huge impact on engagement on social networks. I generate images on-the-fly with the post title and some images, which makes links take up much more space on feeds.
I use Typora on Windows which is a markdown editor which is good.
When I'm on my phone, I sometimes use the GitHub web interface.
I journal in a README.md and add a new entry to the end of the file. Links are on my profile.
I would love not having to rent my platform from anyone, but our current system does not support owned domains for a non-technical user who does not have the tens of thousands of dollars to apply for owning their own TLD.
It's imo the problem with something like GitHub as well. Git is already decentralized and if you push to GitHub you still have your local copy of the repo. But then if someone creates a pull request on the platform not only do you have to use the platform but some data will stay on and only exist on the platform.
Also liked yahoo pipes to mix in git commits, jira, and wiki updates to have a “work stream” that I checked on during the day.
>"As of 2022-11, Twitter is rejecting new API access for applications used to POSSE/backfeed"
No idea if they will cut off old keys.
I don’t syndicate all of my own website content automatically. For some blog posts, I will summarize my post and add additional content geared for that specific platform and audience.
For example, I will write a long form of a blog post for Medium, and a short form version for Indie Hackers.
I make sure to write similar but unique content for each platform so that Google doesn’t penalize the source website for duplicate content.
> long form for ... short form ... for ...
Hadn't thought about. And on my own website, there could sometimes be "Click to expand", for those who want to expand some paragraph, and get the long version.
> write similar but unique content
That sounds tricky. How do you decide where a piece of unique content in a longer text, fits best :-)
Hmm, if it's related to bigger workplaces, then I guess, LinkedIn? If it's applicable to one-person-projects, maybe IndieHackers? Flamebait: Reddit? (Or how do you decide)