POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere | Hacker News Reader

POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

indieweb.org

414 pointstosh82 comments

I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums.

But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.

Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.

If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

Nice blog, thanks for this one: https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/. Well written - I only need to read that once and now remembered it.

> If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles

Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout

There are quite a few useful linkbacks:

- The social urls (bluesky, mastodon, twitter, linkedin, hn, lobsters etc) are just in my Yaml frontmatter as a key

- Then there's standard.site which is an ATProto registration that gets an article into that ecosystem https://standard-search.octet-stream.net

- And for longer articles I get a DOI from https://rogue-scholar.org (the above URL is also https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46) which gets it a bit more metadata.

On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.

Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.

I like Kagi's small web initiative to help people find personal sites: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web-updates

> If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.

If you have a Mastodon account, you can embed all responses to your Mastodon post into your site. See https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...

I just use HN as my comment platform. I have a Hugo short code that (very respectfully!) grabs the comments on a full rebuild, but only if those comments are not already cached and if the post is less than 7 days old. The formatting looks quite good on my site. Feel free to check it out at the bottom of this post: https://mketab.org/blog/sqlite_kdbx

I follow this approach. It's mostly because I want to own the land I build on.

It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort.

It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.

> It works well, but it's hard to automate

That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE

Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.

I don't agree with your first point at all, posting on other platforms is trivial and there's what must be hundreds of post scheduling options you can hook into an RSS feed. Here's a completely open source one that you have to spend a lot of time configuring API keys for, but then it just works: https://postiz.com/

What makes it difficult is all of the quirks you have to account for. For the most trivial example, Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, but it's 300 on Bluesky, 500 on Threads, and on Mastodon it is whatever your instance wants it to be.

For another quirk, I have like a side-project in which I publish snippets of DJs playing copyrighted music, and while I can post those videos on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube without worrying about copyright, I am like 99% confident my website would be instantly delisted from all the search engines if I used the POSSE strategy for that use case.

I agree with your second point that getting anything useful out of it (as in traffic to the source) is pretty much impossible. On Instagram you can only do that via stories, but you can't automate it, because you need Instagram's story editor to add a link to the story. On TikTok you can't even put a link-in-bio until you reach a 1000 followers. On Twitter you might as well not bother, as the medium itself prefers completely unsourced claims. As for Facebook, I honestly don't even know why anyone would bother with Facebook these days, it's completely irrelevant.

> they specifically don't want you to POSSE

They want you to engage with their user base and not just dump links. They also prefer if users stay on the platform, but recent research shows that the deprioritization is partly a myth; people actually engage less with external links.

The link in the comments crap is to get people to click the comment section, this engaging with the post and boosting their reputation with the algorithm.

Whenever I saw an "in the comments" I immediately lose respect for the write because I assume it's nothing more than engagement bait

Not necessarily helpful, but have you tried posting services like Buffer.co?

> the discussion will vary by community

It seems like the culture and audience of each social media service is fairly unique. Is crossposting worth while for you?

While every type of discussion does happen everywhere to some degree, the type of discussion on each service feels somewhat modal. Blasting everything, everywhere could be a little spammy.

Disagree that it’s hard to automate. There are services and tools that make it easy. I use micro.blog which can cross-post to as many or few socials as you want. (I’m not affiliated, just a happy user.)

And I’m not sure it’s about traffic rather than about, well, being active in multiple different communities. You cross-post where you don’t mind participating, and ignore the rest.

A cool feature for the small web would be:

1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS

2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc).

3. I can go to those places to talk about it.

Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.

I've never implemented it, but I think WebMentions was supposed to enable this

Agreed. The feeds I want to see blogging on is my RSS reader, not just constantly dumped onto social media feeds unless someone is explicitly bringing it up to talk about a post in general. If its just announcing a post exists, it feels spammy.

Finding external conversations about posts obviously is a bit more complicated but also if I actually care to see if discussion ever happened, I do so by searching the url. Something that linking via permashortlinks impairs.

As someone on the receiving end of POSSE, who is often on the multiple platforms people post to, this approach ends up feeling impersonal and spammy. I totally get the reasoning people have for doing it. But, to me, it's very "ship it" focused, rather than conversation focused. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Can you elaborate? What is impersonal about it? It's more like the opposite: Author doesn't force a reader to choose a specific platform.

Impersonal in the sense the article etc isn't being presented for the specific audience. It's just being dumped everywhere with the same contextual text ("Wrote this piece about...."). So, I'm seeing it everywhere in the exact same way. Which feels way spammy (and which I've admittedly had to do myself, as per the times). But, I'm used to feeling like the person I follow is posting stuff to the community in language specific to their readers. I say "used to", but I'm probably thinking back decades now. Back when your audience / reader base was the metric of personal. Not the platform.

I feel conflicted with this view. It feels partially like something social media giants would advocate, the idea that their little social media platform is some special community where people are different and normal open web rules shouldn't apply.

I feel the philosophy of posting on the web and hosting your own website is that the web is the community with which I want to share my thoughts. If I just wanted to share my thoughts with just one platform/community, I would go and just post it on that one platform, I wouldn't go to the trouble of running a website.

I get that it's important that there's safe spaces, and some communities should be like that (essentially, private but online) but that view should be the minority and exception for edge cases, rather than the default view of all different websites or platforms.

I fully accept that my view may be dated to the point of having inverse consequences (maybe in line with what you're saying). But, there's just no getting around the feeling I get when I see the exact same post, in the exact same context, showing up on every platform I use. There's just no way that can't feel like spam. And when I do it, it feels like I'm spamming people, too. Having come up in the blogging days of 2003 on, I'm just sort of programmed that way now. But, like I said above, I get why people do it.

Side note: It's such a bizarre thing that the platform you're on matters at all. Not without reason (they all have a vibe now, that's basically politically informed). But, back then, you were just on whatever blog platform was the easiest. The platform was more or less invisible (or at least ignored).

goldpanner complains about wet tools

I definitely relate to that feeling. I miss the days of forum signatures which felt like the perfect solution.

And funny you should say that side note, I also agree. A relevant observation/recollection a few days ago:

> there was a time where social media platforms were defined by their features, Vine was short video, snapchat was disappearing pictures, twitter was short status posts etc. but now they're all bloated messes that try do everything.

I feel blogging was one of the main platform and the main feature in the early 2000s. There was a period from mid 2000s to mid 2010s where there was a separation between platforms and features, and now they've reconsolidated into all platforms having all features... I think? I don't really follow/use social media much, I've not used TikTok but I guess it might break the cycle.

I also find it ends up looking rather spammy. A blog article is written, and then it's posted everywhere in an attempt to drive traffic to it. It's often hard to see a difference between someone practicing POSSE and someone spamming in an attempt to help their SEO. This is especially true of 100% of their posts are just links off to the blog, where they treat all the social platforms like alternate RSS protocols.

A social networking site designed around POSSE may be different, where you can subscribed to your blog as a means to post, and the post shows up as the RSS would in a feed reader. This way people don't have to click through to read what was posted, or can at least read what is above the fold. This can be rounded out with comments, one-off posting, and maybe some standard way to write a blog post that references another, for a proper linked/threaded response for more thought out and thoughtful replies than a short comment.

Exactly. 9/10 of the time it's just link-dumping.

You have false illusions about "a community" where none exists. Jut like you don't belong to any community by following a TV series. You are a consumer, not a community member. There's nothing spammy about publishing your stuff on several different platforms. Different audiences are on different platforms, because they have different habits and different ways they prefer to consume information.

atproto feels like a move in the right direction for personal publishing that makes content discovery easier withtout the need to post to multiple channels / platforms. https://standard.site/ is one initiative working towards making this a reality.

ATProto is a great idea that will never go anywhere because of its close association with Bluesky the service, and Bluesky the company, and that's a shame.

atproto has an active IETF Working Group: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/atp/about/

XMPP had one too.

I don’t think it does. ATProto is merely “managed storage for apps” by Bluesky and it’s quite opposing to POSSE - You rely on third parties entirely, not just for hosting but also access and moderation to your own content.

What you can and can’t do with your own content is also limited and managed by someone else. The entire premise that you can move your posts history etc, while technically true, is not compatible with the web (e.g. support for things like redirects, canonical urls being handled currently etc is again all outside of your control and a not a goal of Bluesky).

ATProto is in many ways like the custom HTML extensions Microsoft had in Internet Explorer to “make better user experience”.

For me one of the main points of POSSE is resilience. If the VCs behind Bluesky got tired of it tomorrow, all that would die is some links to your website. Your posts and content, RSS subscribers, people who linked or bookmarked your website etc - remain unaffected.

I think you're missing the point.

With the IndieWeb version of POSSE, the source of truth is the webpage you control.

For the ATProto version of POSSE, the source of truth is the record in your PDS. That record is interesting because it is both content-addressed and signed with your private key.

Where ever that record is syndicated, the reader (or app displaying the content) should be able to demonstrably verify the authenticity of the record.

And you can host your own PDS entirely independent of Bluesky, there are several interfaces for both reading and publishing Standard.site records:

* Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub/ )

* pckt (https://pckt.blog/ )

* Wordpress (https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-atproto )

It's also not that hard to write your own display interface for just your data if you want.

> the source of truth is the record in your PDS

> content-addressed and signed with your private key

Technically valid but also not required. ATProto works hard to present them as valuable or needed, like added value of sorts but:

- The need for signed content is niche to specific use-cases. Not sure even news outlets need this as long as they control their domain.

- The PDS is a funny contraption of protocols and technologies that are quite complex and probably can't (usefully) exist on their own outside the "atmosphere" ... even if you manage to set one up.

The question would be, why bother with all this complexity and layers when you can self-host your website anyway.

The added value of a PDS/ATProto is to participate in the social cloud of Bluesky. Without it, the entire thing is more of an engineering showcase than a useful tool.

I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating.

If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.

I created https://tildeweb.nl just for this

I like when I read something, and it has links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. Most blogs don't have a very active comment field, and if I'm reading it a few days late, it's nice to still be able to find other's thoughts on the matter.

> links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc.

I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web.

There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.

Linking and discovery, use of AP, etc, are well and good for a pub/sub model -- but you're replying to someone interested in extended discussion / commentary and community (such as we enjoy here on HN). Flatly asserting "There shouldn't be a 'main' discussion" kind of dismisses their stated desire out of hand -- though as I (re)consider it (as I compose this comment) I think you have a valid point.

The POSSE approach implies scattered discussions, almost by definition; posting a link to your blog post on HN or some other site invites discussion on each of those forums, by design. And yeah, the proliferation of siloed communities, each designed to pull users in and keep them there, poses some meaningful challenges to certain visions for what the web could be.

I definitely agree that links matter, and the idea of POSSE has always resonated. People should have a space of their own to share whatever is of most interest and meaning to them. I really like Derek Sivers' take on this w/ his personal site:

https://sive.rs/ti

If I werent more critical, I would have read this as an astroturf by big tech sort of thing. Like "it's inevitable that big tech will win, and so therefore syndicate everywhere or you have lost the game." I dont really get what game we're playing though. Why do I care if my friend who only uses Facebook sees my blog posts? What do I get from that other than the feeling of a maybe-connection (much like their criticism of federated networks - youre hoping for a future where this works out for you.)

I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.

> I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.

This is an interesting view point and I agree and disagree. I imagine people are split. There are clearly people who put stuff on the web and want to get it into all eyeballs whether those eyeballs want it or not. I see the logic and appeal behind that: if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? If you don't want everyone to read what you're writing, why put it on the Web of all places?

In reality though, the older I get, the more fear I have about posting online, especially on a personal website, through fear of being rude, or imposing, or coming across like some sort of narcissistic influencer. It feels like a sign of self awareness and maturity to believe that not everyone wants to read what you have to say.

>if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read?

I write in public so that there’s a time stamped publicly accessible record of my opinion that I can reference quickly for people I’m communicating with. It’s like a public ledger

I don’t really care how many people read my writing because it’s illegible to 99.999999% of humans (I’d guess there are about 7000 ppl on earth who could grok my work). Not everything is for everyone. Just because I publish doesn’t mean I want everyone to read my stuff

Yeah, I agree with your approach entirely - it feels like the mature option compared to the young influencer view that you want everyone to read your opinion.

Seeing it as a public ledger, rather than a platform or podium means you might not even want people to read it, but you do need everyone to be able to for it to act as a valid public ledger.

RSS is a refreshingly simple way (and thus, trustworthy) of taking back control over what we see in a world of algorithmic "curation" (i.e. mixing in ads and manipulation, and taking away things that would interest us).

I do this, my site is in my profile description.

However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque.

That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.

Yeah, I’m happy to just call permashortlinks a bad idea, seldom warranted historically and roughly never now. The article offers no explanation about why to use permashortlinks—what looks to be “a few reasons why” is actually a few reasons why to link to the original (rather than copying and pasting the contents), nothing to do with the permashortlink practice.

https://indieweb.org/permashortlink does give a few reasons, but they’re bunk. “More reliable in email”? Not meaningfully so. “Quicker to recall / copy due to size”? Not typically a concern. Maybe a nice-to-have, but you can consider adjusting your URL style, then it can be even better. “Less effort to manually enter”? Repeat of the previous point.

And it doesn’t address the problems of the permashortlink. Cost. Diluting across different domains. Having something different to maintain and remember.

Don’t do separate permashortlinks. Just fix your regular links to not be bad.

I wonder whether this actually works:

> Q: Do we need to worry about search engines penalizing apparently duplicate posts?

> A: That's why the POSSE copies SHOULD always link back to the originals. So that search engines can infer that the copies are just copies. Ideally POSSE copies on silos should use rel-canonical to link back to the originals, but even without explicit rel-canonical, the explicit link back to the original is a strong hint that it is an original.

I follow the opposite with PESOS: Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. Work really nicely as I've got some automation and systems in place that allow me to maintain a full firehose of all my posts and notable actions across the web on my own site. Then I can sort through them and reference them (which I do frequently) with ease. I do recommend.

Thanks for posting, Declan! I just checked out your site (https://vale.rocks) and it's inspiring. Have an awesome day!

Cheers, Chris! Thanks for checking it out. Hope your day is equally wonderful.

I've always liked this idea.

However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed.

It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g.

1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel)

2. DCS adds domain to those topics

3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed)

You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals.

e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff

Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.

This is just spit balling.

Didn't you just describe a social media feed?

The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).

Yes and no

A social media feed implies 1(n) curated by 1 algorithm hosted on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram

What I was thinking is:

- foo.social

- bar.social (tech curations)

- java.bar.social (sub curated Java list)

All these DCS (domain content servers) would be polled by your own local client

Your client can then aggregate or organise how it shows this feed

e.g. I could have a trending aggregator for situations where a blog post is shown on multiple domains (sort of shows virality)

I think it's funny that "POSSE" in Portuguese means "ownership". :)

I hated this (so far) for any microblog-related things where I tried it. That was mostly many years ago with Twitter.

To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother.

On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.

Recommended stack for this? Wordpress?

I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc.

Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?

    > Recommended stack for this? Wordpress?

I have some old Wordpress sites around as well as sites hosted in Firebase and GitHub. I'd recommend the latter two because Wordpress is a bit of a pain to maintain on an ongoing basis. It has a relatively large attack area and over the two decades I've operated it, I've had multiple times that malware made its way in via various channels.

I'd move my WP sites, but I'm also too lazy to convert everything over to Astro (one day, I'll tackle this with an agent).

- GitHub pages is a really nice DX. I have one example here: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... with a custom CNAME: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... - Firebase hosting is generally free and I think the DX is generally good, but you will be charged for large spikes in traffic. I deploy an Astro published blog like this: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-d...

Interesting that the article missed POSSE party by Justin Searls [1] in their tools section.

[1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party

It’s in the article.

I do this with long blog posts, but not short tweet-like things. That feels ok some of the times as most of the micro-posts are throw-away, but sometimes I do make some posts I refer back to and would like to keep better ownership of.

So I've been thinking of updating my site and habits to center around running my own ATProto PDS and publishing my blog posts there, with my blog just being my web front end to my PDS. Then I could use that same PDS for Bluesky, photos, etc. and self-host a wide variety of things with an interoperable social layer.

Strange to not see the "atproto" term on that page.

Not that strange, the site is from 2016 [0], while ATproto is from 2022 [1].

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb....

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol

for platforms that don't let you post links directly, like Reddit, where links are disabled in most subreddits unless they're major sites. What I do is post the full content of my article, and put something like if you want to read it, on my website, here is the link, or subscribe to get new posts and receive my newsletter. Most people won't visit the site or subscribe, but the people who really like it will do it.

I like the principle, but I also find that we software folk commonly mistake the creation of a website as the goal, rather than the production of "content" (e.g. blog posts). I spent years trying to publish a blog and continually getting derailed building the ultimate static website. Recently I switched to a Substack hosted on my own subdomain, and now I'm finally writing. At least I still own the subdomain.

Hah, reminds of trying to make a blog as a teenager, 20+ years ago. Built my own CMS in PHP with various features. But never got further than having a few lines of text in the draft state. Most of the time was actually spent on having rounded corners (border-radius didn't exist) with some kinda of glass effect for a cool look (inspired by the then unreleased Windows Longhorn). And named my tool the generic name Publish-it, because publi-shit was funny.

I try to do that all the time, I've build a plugin for my blog framework (Kirby: https://plugins.getkirby.com/dewey/kirby-posse) that does that and cross posts it to Bluesky and Mastodon automatically.

I built a syndication service for my site, though it only supports Mastodon. Each supported type has a toggle to syndicate out and, on success, a timestamp is displayed to note when it was syndicated after which the toggle is also displayed.

There's an RSS and JSON feed for each collection and a combined feed as well.

SO this is what pretty much all media does these days right?

Post an article on the newspaper, substack, wherever and then a a link to it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Blue and wherever else.

Nice that we have a name now for something that's pretty much standard and common practice. Not that we necessarily needed a name, but it's still nice to have one.

Agreed, and good to know other people also doing similar processes

> now

The idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier.

Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.

> something that's pretty much standard and common practice

Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?

The idea is not that you necessarily write a Twitter-length post on your website - you can write a full blog post, but then post links back to that post on social media.

I don't post stuff on a blog, but I do have replies to common arguments written down in Obsidian. I can just copy stuff from there, edit a bit and post.

Previously...

Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments)

POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments)

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)

I like the well-working acronym of its opposite, PESOS - https://indieweb.org/PESOS.

To me, it feels like Star Wars' rebellion, in a struggle against the big tech (big data, big relationship, big dopamine) empire.

POSSE? This is the way.

[flagged]

Edited as suggested.

I also don't think most people are here for unnecessary personal attacks. Flag and move on.

Agreed. Edited to remove the snarky puerility reference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com