Hacker News Reader

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I didn’t know what this acronym meant. Hopefully I saved someone a Google search.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I searched for this and then came back, only to find the answer below!

I asked Perplexity what this acronym stands for and this is its reply:

https://imgur.com/a/oWfIjkZ

The interwebs is such hot garbage that we now need to use ChatGPT to search.

Thanks! You saved me from exactly that.

Nice - thanks.

> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.

Perhaps I'm lucky (probably). Perhaps my work would've gotten more attention if I spent more effort promoting it (probably). The things I do because I find them interesting are not things I feel the need to promote, because I'm not doing them for attention.

If your goal is to grab a lot of attention, you will inexorably have to do things that are not interesting because the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland.

> the only way to achieve broad appeal is to not offend anyone's tastes and the only way to do that is to be bland

Careful. While I agree with the premise, you make it sound binary. You can have broad-er appeal while still being individual.

One can have even broader appeal by offending everyone

True!

On that …

- It's generally easier for people to know what they _don't_ like than what they _do_. Preferences are defined by process of elimination.

- The commonality is: get lots of people on the same page about you, and you've got a big audience / broad appeal. But the most engaged audience is the one who has strong emotions attached, so being an offender guarantees a ravenous audience … and is generally easier.

> Careful.

I witnessed a memorable moment at work when an engineer responded to a VP and started by saying “careful.” Had it been another engineer, it would have been ignored as authoritative-sounding filler. But the VP did not take it well.

I would have loved to seen their expression …

That's like an actor breaking character during a play and it pops the bubble of reality the audience has been living in.

Do you mind explaining why this was problematic? I'm working to track down things that I say that might be interpreted in ways other than I intend, and this sounds like a mistake I would make. What's the problematic message that's being sent here from the engineer to the VP?

I suspect that the issue here is that either the VP was insecure or that the engineer said it in an accusatory way (or both).

In all likelihood, the engineer meant "that approach/idea/decision has risks we should consider." The VP likely heard "you are suggesting something wrong/dangerous/ignorant."

A nuance here is that the engineer probably implied that "(We should be) careful (in our consideration)" and the VP perceived "(You need to be) careful (and you don't seem to be)"

You say careful, and their ego probably hears you calling them careless. Careless is typically an avoided behavior so this hurts them. They view themselves as careful and wise. You think they're dumb. (Not necessarily a syllogism, but the ego is weird)

I'm possibly paraphrasing and simplifying too much but "How to Win Friends and influence People" mentions being very cautious about correcting people, more so correcting them publically, even when you are correct.

> How to Win Friends and influence People

Such a good book, I'm about due for a re-read I think.

As stated by another response, it says the speaker thinks the listener is careless.

It also places the speaker in a position of authority, admonishing someone who is still learning. "Careful!" is what we say to children. A high-status person may be particularly sensitive to this, but nobody likes to be talked down to. As I alluded, I hear this amongst engineers and filter it out as verbal fluff, so there are cases where it is ok.

An easy alternative to "careful" is "I'm not sure about that" or even "I disagree." Both are what peers would say to each other. In scenarios where a high-status person is not receptive to being talked to as a peer, well, you get to add all the deference and qualification you need to, but it comes down to stating disagreement in a non-disagreeable way.

When people give advice to content creators in the form of "when you do interesting things" my brain immediately jumps to one question; how do you know what other people consider interesting?

Honest question, because I am just starting out, myself. I have a small blog where I share my opinions and projects related to technology I enjoy. However, if I were to do a thought experiment and assume my audience is HN readers, I'd hesitate to say anyone here would find my posts very interesting. I like them, but I am not sure who else would.

I genuinely do not understand how to evaluate an audience, so I just write what I like to write and hope for the best.

I know people here don't like site analytics, but for this one it's pretty good.

Setup Matomo or similar analytics software, write about a bunch of topics and review after a year which topics your readers are most interested in, for which they search on your site etc.

Don’t evaluate your audience; it’s a losing game. Write things so you can find them later, and leave the rest to chance. Worked quite well for me.

It primarily refers to what you consider interesting.

When you have a decent number of posts and some visitors you can see which sub set they find the most interesting.

You can also make a blog about things that don't interest you at all. This is the shortest route to success and you will hate your new job :)

>> If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

> This has not been my experience. If you do interesting things then there are plenty of people who are willing to bring attention to it. I've been cold-emailed by journalists wanting to interview me without ever doing anything other than a) make my work publicly accessible and b) collaborate with like-minded people.

Both of those are promoting your work so it is your experience. Your experience just has been that you haven't had to put much work into promoting your work so it doesn't feel like promoting your work to you.

>Don’t be that JS guy who rewrites their entire site every week in a different stack and writes a blog post about it.

seems like a perfectly reasonable idea for a blog about different stacks. I'm not advocating it, but there's nothing wrong with it if that's what interests you.

That close minded opinion you quoted left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me not want to check the OP's blog out.

Almost every opinion people have has been covered by someone else in some way unless you are working at the forefront of something, so it usually depends on how you value-add to existing things with your own experience.

It's also that sort of I-know-what's-better attitude that turns a personal thing into a competitive thing.

What is semi-successful anyway...

You’re missing the point.

OP is saying don’t be the person who says they want to write about Frogs, but who then spends an immense amount of effort not writing about Frogs, and writing about procrastination instead.

If it had been phrased like yours, I'd completely agree. I reread that part from the OP, but the point really doesn't come across.

Nothing wrong with that either. It is an unpaid hobby. Doing what you feel like doing is perfectly fine.

I'd argue that you could write only for yourself for your entire life and still have a successful blog.

Yep. The success metric isn’t unidimensional here. Having external readers is just a cherry on top. I didn’t even think anyone else would find my writings interesting, let alone useful.

Often, the only reason I write is to have a method of sorting out the soup of thoughts in my head into a recognisable shape, with the accountability that being public brings to it (no, you can't have the link to my site!).

Well said. Sometimes I notice that I’m thinking about a thing for days or weeks and the only way to make it stop is to write a post about it.

People focus a lot on the 'web', and not enough on the 'log'

Problem in a nutshell, excellent.

Bring back .plan files!

> No one cares about the technology behind your site

You know a blog is going to be good when it's using the default wordpress theme from 10 years ago.

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

I was hoping someone would post that (^_^)

Exactly. Or a pure HTML and CSS site, like Daan Luu’s or Russ Cox’s blog.

Strong disagree on Medium, Substack, etc. There are very famous and popular blogs on both with tons of followers. My sister asked for a blog, I steered her to substack. Zero effort, just works.

> Your readers deserve better. Don’t waste their time.

Nothing about substack wastes readers time.

Conversely, what wastes their time is your site being down or hacked and what wastes your time is maintaining your blog's infra, updating because vulnerabilities, and/or using bad UIs like blogging from github (maybe passable for nerds, not for non-nerds)

A blog isn't about the tech you use. It's about the writing. Worrying about tech is not going to add a single reader to your blog.

Substack is trash. VC-backed, full of tracking pixels and privacy-invading anti-features, constant push to monetize, cross-promote and increase engagement... Every blogger who has moved there has gotten less interesting than they were when they were independent. It's everything that is wrong about social media cynically branded as some kind of alternative media outlet.

Of course there is plenty of money to be made as a social media influencer who specializes in long form content, and if that's the career a person is interested in building then sure - Substack, Medium, whatever - great choice. But for people who are interested in blogging as it used to be, independent writers who want to write without the pressure of editors, without paywalls, without popups, without forcing their readers into signup funnels... It might be a bit more work to set up, but tools like WordPress, Ghost etc are better suited.

> Nothing about substack wastes readers time.

Login modal wastes time.

> if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.

Disagree. If it took less thinking than it will take reading, then yes, probably not worth it. But if you can trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line, people will love you.

Too many people babble to keep the underlying lies and fraud and their complicity burried in narratives.

> trim your writing to the pith in every paragraph or even line

This takes a lot of time. Writing concisely is much more challenging and time-consuming than writing verbosely. Writing unnecessarily long essays means that your readers end up spending more time reading them than you did writing them.

As Blaise Pascal wrote: "I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter."

I like this post about the value of brevity that starts with “disagree”, immediately agrees with what it’s responding to, and then goes on to talk about a completely unrelated thing

> That said, if it took less time to write than it would take someone to read, it’s probably not worth writing.

Is that actually a possibility? I can't type faster than I can read.

You can if yountype complicated tjings and include typos that make it hard to decode anything much less a run on sentence like this that includes redundancies and extra meaningless words saying the same thing which is easy to type but takes ages to read.

Well done.

LLMs

You don't have to type. I wrote some things with hundreds of links then assumed the reader was at least somewhat familiar with the set of links above each paragraph. I may even try keep opinions out of it (less effort) and simply paint a context with references for the reader to do their own thinking.

>POSSE

What does this mean? (Googling wasn't helpful.)

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

> POSSE is the way to go. If you don’t promote your work, no one else will.

I agree but when I tried this a few weeks ago, it looked like a lot of work to publish on my own blog and then replicate everywhere else. I didn't find a good tool and got lost trying out fediverse stuff.

I just post it manually on twitter, bluesky, mastodon, and linkedin. Works well for me. I tend not to look for a tool until a process starts hurting.

> all of them suck.

> POSSE is the way to go

Can you host your own blog, but replicate (in part) in dev.to?

Is it against their TOS to have a link to an original, or even only include teasers advertising the 'real' blog post?

It's kind of like having you main git repo somewhere, but cloning to GitHub for the community.

I've had the exact same experience. I'd add that Substack will give you some mildly helpful distribution at times as well.

The term POSSE is new to me. It is a great learning experience.

What tech do you recommend for own site? Wordpress?

It probably doesn't matter much either way, but I use vanilla HTML/JS

You don't need some fancy tech. Blogs have been around for 30+ years and function just fine on such old tech. The only new tech you should use is certbot and own your own domain.

Write in markdown and serve directly, or export to HTML. Or write in LibreOffice Writer and export to HTML.

Upload HTML to a basic webserver. You don't need a fancy load balancer or denial-of-human-system or anything.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

> Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

No, you just need a host that doesn't have ridiculously small limits. You can easily find find hosts with limits in hundreds of GB, or TB, or even unmetered. You can find them for free, and you can find them for quite cheap compared to most technologists' incomes.

Were each image 1 MB? My rule of thumb is to have smaller pictures in the page and to link to their full size if needs be. If your webpage exceed a ebook in size while not having more features, there’s a wrong decision made somewhere.

I’d not use Wordpress personally. Luckily for you, there are plenty of options: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms

SGML.

Just joking. Sort of. There's apparently a modern tool you can use to transpile SGML to HTML[0], and I'm itching to try it out.

--

[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... - yes, it's an NPM package, and yes, you can run it in the browser, but you can also use it on a server, or as a static site generator.

The non-blog parts of my site [1] are in XML and I use xsltproc to generate HTML. It's technically a static-site generator. It works, but my God, is XSLT a verbose (functional) language.

[1] https://www.conman.org/

I loved XSLT. I thought it was the most perfect language ever created. What was I thinking?

what are some good self-hosted blog alternatives? something with features similar to ghost/substack

This is a long-shot, but take a look here:

    https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io

I've been blogging for decade(s) with:

    http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/blog.html
    http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/dynamic/isp.html

...it's basically a janky (possibly insecure?) perl-cgi-script which converts a directory of markdown files into a blog.

I love the idea of it in that it's just markdown files! `vim ~/blog/entries/some-random-thought.txt` end ups with $AUTHOR of `chown`, $DATE of the file modification time, tree of `mkdir -p ~/blog/entries/some/category` ... it's just trivial to backup, restore, and work with. You can even (probably) hook it up to a static regen which is probably safer: http://blosxom.com/documentation/users/install/static/

The link to datasette is if you're wanting to nerd around a bit more, as it's kindof a combo of sqlite and a web server for rendering data from within it. The linked github repo is how their main site is built/rendered and it definitely has aspects of "blogginess", and you can kindof see how it's done. The neat thing of `let tags = "SELECT DISTINCT tags FROM posts"` or transforming blogging into effectively updating/adding records in a database is an extension of the blosxom zen of "it's just files [records], yo! go forth and edit them..."

wordpress.org is the defacto standard right?

set plugins and themes to auto-update, add wordfence and change default settings.

use updraft or similar to pull full backups on a schedule.