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Comment by taurusnoises | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

goldpanner complains about wet tools

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.

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