POSSE: a better way to post on social networks - The Verge

As someone that has been blogging since before social networking existed the intersection of blogging and social media is something I've had first-hand experience with and have developed strong opinions about. I ultimately look back at the several years that I primarily engaged with Twitter and didn’t blog as much as a lost period. Blurting out 140 character tweets is nothing like writing real blog posts.

The Indie Web concept of POSSE is an attempt to bridge these worlds. This Verge article is a good introduction.

The answer, I think, lies in a decade-old idea about how to organize the internet. It’s called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

I've used micro.blog since it launched and used it’s syndication features for a long time.

So for now, the best we have are tools like Micro.blog, a six-year-old platform for cross-posters. When you sign up for Micro.blog, you get your own blog (which the platform offers to connect to your own domain) and a way to automatically cross-post to Mastodon, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Medium, Pixelfed, Nostr, and Flickr.

A while back I turned all of that off and no longer syndicate my posts anywhere.

POSSE is an interesting strategy but you need to be clear what you are trying to do. There are broadly three issues:

1. Owning your own content, publishing with your own name, being efficient
2. Minimizing distractions
3. Supporting social media

I think these kind of stack on top of each other. If the main thing you want is to make sure you content is on your own domain — not your domain, not your words — this sort of works. Note that syndicating your content to a social network does mean that you give them ownership of that copy of it. But most folks aren't really thinking about legal ownership. So, yes POSSE will help here.

If your focused on minimizing distractions of social media POSSE really doesn't help. In fact, I think it can make it worse by reducing the "cost" of sending content into multiple networks. That creates a mirage, because it is a really bad idea to syndicate your content to a social network and then completely ignore it. On one side it seems lame to not engage with people when they engage with you. Even worse, if there is some "issue" that arises from your post you should be aware. You can ultimately look like a robot.

Lastly, if you feel social networking is just bad overall and don't want to support it, you shouldn't syndicate your content into it. This is why I've turned all my syndication off. It is like being a member in a club you don't want to exist.

Overall folks should do what they wish but I think many folks turn on POSSE capabilities without really thinking it through. I would just ask to consider how the syndication is affecting your writing and your attention. For example, I've noticed a trend of writing for the timeline when syndicating.