POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

White generally highlights many good benefits of the IndieWeb strategy to Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere (POSSE). It is a great way to make sure that you always have full access to all of your writing, photos, and whatever else. Note that I’m careful to not say ownership because all social platforms assume ownership of everything you post. Syndicated from your blog doesn't matter. The syndicated copy of that article is now the property of the social platform.

I've been a micro.blog user for years now and I’m a big fan. I think micro.blog is probably one of the very best platforms for POSSE that exist. Micro.blog calls it cross-posting, and right now it supports syndicating to Medium, Mastadon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, Pixelfed, and Threads. That is impressive. It used to support Twitter before that site decided to withdraw from the web and charge erroneous fees for access to the API.

I used to use multiple of these but have lately stopped using them entirely. The issue I have is one that White highlights:

POSSE is not without its challenges, though. For one, although it handles the publishing end of things, it does not solve the issue of conversations fragmented across multiple platforms. When a person responds to a syndicated post, the reply typically remains siloed on that platform. (Some backfeed replies onto their own sites, though I choose not to do this.) Because I actively use the three platforms where I currently syndicate my microblog posts, I just reply to any comments on the platforms where they happen, and deal with the fact that sometimes similar conversations happen in multiple places.

Syndicating content into all these surveillance systems in some way feels to me like I’m supporting them. And then to see if I should follow-up with a reply I have to drag myself into these attention vices to do that. I don't think it is worth it and I've stopped syndicating entirely. I actually have feel a bit anti-POSSE really. For two reasons:

1. I think where your writing goes affects the writing itself. I know this is true for me. When micro.blog was syndicating to Twitter (pre-X) I found myself routinely using 4 photos but no more. Why? Because only the first four would be syndicated.
2. I found myself forcing my posts to be under 300 characters? Why, because that changed how it was syndicated.

The medium does matter, and I want my medium to be the open web. I also don't mind that if you want to read that, you need to leave those platforms and venture out into the web. Don't worry, it is great out here.