POSSE is great from a content ownership perspective, and having syndication is better than having nothing in place.
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.
Syndicate usually doesn't mean just posting a link, it means actually posting all the content on other platforms. Cory Doctorow is a good example, every blog post is on his own site (pluralistic.net), but the full content is also posted on Twitter, Mastodon, Medium, and Tumblr. If you use one of those platforms you can read his stuff without ever visiting his site.
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.
I think a part of the POSSE idea is precisely that, yes, in the moment you have those disadvantages. It wouldn't be its own idea if there wasn't some sort of tradeoff involved.
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.)
> 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
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.
Leaving off the loaded language, I'll call them potential readers.
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.
> 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.
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.
A lot of this is down to deliberate API limitations of social networks, that are implemented to make them more walled gardens. For instance being able to reverse syndicate comments and likes from FB to your blog should be trivial, but AFAIK not allowed in the FB API.
> That said, posting links to original content tends to get low engagement and is generally disliked on downstream social networks.
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?
On Reddit at least, posting links to your own site or your own content on third party sites tends to be seen as "self promotion" and at least a little bit icky, even if you don't financially benefit. Some subreddit communities will tolerate it if you are an active participant in other threads on the sub; others dislike it even then.
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.
What a beautiful thing if you think about it. You own your content and use Twitter, etc as a communication layer in your protocol. Restricted API access makes this difficult but what an evolution.
It's great but for the interaction problem. And mixed contexts.
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.
I have mixed feelings about "the conversation" and social networks. Frequently there is no conversation.
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.
> And then there is the influencer, marketing communication, discoverability, sales funnel, SEO, push perspective.
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).
I really like this concept and kind of think that it would be the ideal state of the web if a lot of people would be doing this, however the tech part of it is pretty bad, being reliant on external APIs sucks.
Is there a turn-key POSSE blogging platform where I don't have to do more than pay, and sign in with each platform to start syndicating my posts? While I love the idea, I've always found implementing all of the integrations to be too much work.
The services listed in that section only enable a very small subset of syndicated platforms, which doesn't overlap at all with the platforms I'd actually like to publish on (Instagram, Facebook, Substack) and most of the mainstream social platforms aren't even supported.
As someone else mentioned on another thread, we've got services like https://brid.gy which aim to be a central means for doing this, but there are also other apps for other platforms, and in some cases, you need to do it yourself
This seems like a new skin on COPE (create once, publish everywhere), an NPR idea from 10+ years ago. Ironically, it fits to just rebrand someone else's established ideas like this.
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]
I'm really glad I've been doing this the last decade. It was just announced that imgur is deleting all images not uploaded by someone with an active account. I used imgur quite a bit for sharing images but always made sure to put them on my webserver first.
This philosophy has been around in data management for a long time and applies to social media or personal content as well.
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.
I've been building a personal website service [1] as an alternative to social media. I hadn't heard of POSSE, but I call my idea "Write once, share everywhere" - the idea being that your content should live on your site, but can be shared on other social networks.
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.
The only caveat I usually have with this is that this idea of "owning" your content by publishing it on your own site is the domain name, which you rent, rather than own.
Not really. There have been a lot of proposals, but it's not possible to do without tradeoffs (Zooko's Triangle). And in practice, most of the proposed alternatives are worse — not only do they not provide one or more of the desired features, they are also unacceptably complex, fragile, or resource-intensive.
Not to my knowledge at this point in time, though I wish there was. Gopher and other small web tech seem closer to the owned platform idea.
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.
Doesn't the main issue lie in platform specific features? For example, after syndication on Twitter someone DMs you with relevant information to your post.
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.
But you don’t have to monitor or respond to DMs. Your profile can contain a suggestion to use email. On Github, the README or whatever for your project can ask developers to please email patches, or fork, but that you don’t pay attention to Github pull requests.
I like it in theory but if only some of my friends are doing it, or they're not all posting to the same silo, how can I consume their posts without seeing duplicates?
I've often wondered why Wordpress doesn't start a public social network that syndicates only Wordpress sites. Each new user could get a default wordpress.org site using a default social networky theme & plugin or you could point your profile at your own hosted Wordpress site that had a plugin to syndicate - maybe using PubSubHubbub?
I love this philosophy, but question whether it needs an acronym that implies it's a system. Unless there's more to it than "have a personal blog, and promote it."
I don’t know about Facebook, because I don’t have an account there, but I do this with Twitter. A new item on my website gets automatically tweeted with using a script that calls a Twitter API. I certainly don’t pay Twitter anything. If they start charging for using the API, I’m out.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Indie Hackers, and Reddit is a good start.
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.
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)
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.