POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere(indieweb.org)
indieweb.org
POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
44 comments
Same problem with TikTok. You have to tell your viewers to check your profile and then you have a single link to your home page, and they will have to go there and dig around for whatever information you want them to see. Not ideal, but I still want to drive everyone to a domain I own rather than have them live on a platform I don't.
Pinterest banned my account the other day by mistake and it took me two weeks of pestering the shit out of them for them to admit it and reinstate it.
Pinterest banned my account the other day by mistake and it took me two weeks of pestering the shit out of them for them to admit it and reinstate it.
That's why services like LinkTree got really popular. You could do the same with your own website pretty easily.
Yeah, I use my own domain in my profile for the reason given in the article - it's pointless to drive someone off social media and land them straight onto another property you don't own.
>> I think the problem is that social media platforms, especially Twitter downranks your post if it has a link.
Huh - is this true? It anecdotally felt very true to me when posting content - is there data/reports on this somewhere to view?
Huh - is this true? It anecdotally felt very true to me when posting content - is there data/reports on this somewhere to view?
The problem is that it's very hard to distinguish between "posts with links get less engagement because Twitter is subtly suppressing them" and "posts with links get less engagement because people are just less likely to click 'like' and 'retweet' on them."
I might be wrong, but IIRC, the 'links dont get clicked' was already a problem before they started adding algorithms to the timeline. This is about clicks and not engagement though.
Also, you can see how many times a tweet was viewed and interacted with in the analytics, so you could try to do your own comparison by seeing the % of views that trigger engagement
Also, you can see how many times a tweet was viewed and interacted with in the analytics, so you could try to do your own comparison by seeing the % of views that trigger engagement
You're right, and I think it's a testament to how effective POSSE is. The dinosaur platforms are scared of it, which is why they are discouraging links.
You described the solution yourself. You can still do POSSE, but instead of a link you can write something like, "link to original post is in the comments" or "originally published on my website, you know how to find it".
It may be tricky or even impossible to automate, but isn't that how you know it's good, according to PG? :)
You described the solution yourself. You can still do POSSE, but instead of a link you can write something like, "link to original post is in the comments" or "originally published on my website, you know how to find it".
It may be tricky or even impossible to automate, but isn't that how you know it's good, according to PG? :)
You are far more optimistic about this than me. The web has centralized rapidly and no platform is incentivized to allow links out.
Without legislation, these platforms can build walls easier than we can build ladders. Your average user isn’t all that interested in following links in the first place, so it’s an uphill battle from every angle.
Without legislation, these platforms can build walls easier than we can build ladders. Your average user isn’t all that interested in following links in the first place, so it’s an uphill battle from every angle.
You're right, I do believe in optimism.
Though it's hard for me to imagine legislation helping the situation, since regulations are usually written for/by the big incumbents to dig a deeper moat around themselves.
Though it's hard for me to imagine legislation helping the situation, since regulations are usually written for/by the big incumbents to dig a deeper moat around themselves.
So, walled gardens are now the dinosaurs and reinvention of good old planet is the new thing they're afraid of :)
> originally published on my website, you know how to find it
I don't think that works. People are already lazy to click a link, imagine having to go to the blog and then search for the actual post
I don't think that works. People are already lazy to click a link, imagine having to go to the blog and then search for the actual post
To put a different spin on that point: it would be perverse to deliberately throw out the cornerstones of the web: URLs and hyperlinks.
(Not that I have a better answer to Twitter's isolationist shenanigans, mind.)
(Not that I have a better answer to Twitter's isolationist shenanigans, mind.)
The scenario I imagine is that they already read the post on the other platform, so the reason they're going to the website is to find the latest and greatest, which appears on the other platforms with a delay, creating an incentive to go to the source.
Of course, this also requires content engaging enough to create that reaction...
Of course, this also requires content engaging enough to create that reaction...
That screams antitrust.
We need to tell our legislators to go after companies that disallow or downrank external links.
We need to tell our legislators to go after companies that disallow or downrank external links.
Not sure about that. Because they tell you the timeline is ordered by what they think you could like - unless you change it back to 'home' - so they can just show data that tells legislators that people don't click on links, and that they interact more with threads instead.
I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.
It's not a dogma so much as a warning from experience. If you post to your own site first you do retain control. If you rely on the silos' api to extract it back to your site you are dependent on them remaining committed to their api. That has not been a good bet in the last decade.
Right, that is the thing people say, but it isn't always true -- you're not more dependent one way or the other with a lot of content workflows. The Lemmy folks break the way I get my posts from their RSS feed format every so often. That's fine, their software's under development. I manually copy-paste the post that failed to PESOS over to my site, and I don't post via Lemmy again until I get the time to fix the integration.
Would I have been saved from that if using their API to post from my site? Well... no, their API is also in a things-change-all-the-time state. Plus I'd have to have a lot more logic in my site build system to handle failure modes in a way that wouldn't spam their system.
And realistically, given the huge portion of us that are using brid.gy for the POSSE we do, that's an external dependency that makes POSSE at least as Theoretically Problematic as PESOS in some large percentage of its real-world use.
If the value of the integration really relies on having the content in both places, I'm dependent either way. (How many people get readers of their single-Tweet-on-a-page microblogs when they're not integrated with Twitter or Mastodon?)
I like the idea of Absolute Control, but once you actually dig into the value that POSSE or PESOS gives when you're using it for more than a "Here's my blog post about my blog's technical stack" usecase... you realize it's still dependency on the whims of some other site's policies (RIP Instagram POSSE) in order to engage with your readers/audience/community there. As long as you want that engagement, you have that dependency. That's okay! If it were about Total Purity, we'd all be running Gopher servers on Raspberry Pis or something.
Would I have been saved from that if using their API to post from my site? Well... no, their API is also in a things-change-all-the-time state. Plus I'd have to have a lot more logic in my site build system to handle failure modes in a way that wouldn't spam their system.
And realistically, given the huge portion of us that are using brid.gy for the POSSE we do, that's an external dependency that makes POSSE at least as Theoretically Problematic as PESOS in some large percentage of its real-world use.
If the value of the integration really relies on having the content in both places, I'm dependent either way. (How many people get readers of their single-Tweet-on-a-page microblogs when they're not integrated with Twitter or Mastodon?)
I like the idea of Absolute Control, but once you actually dig into the value that POSSE or PESOS gives when you're using it for more than a "Here's my blog post about my blog's technical stack" usecase... you realize it's still dependency on the whims of some other site's policies (RIP Instagram POSSE) in order to engage with your readers/audience/community there. As long as you want that engagement, you have that dependency. That's okay! If it were about Total Purity, we'd all be running Gopher servers on Raspberry Pis or something.
When Twitter first came out I thought it would be an RSS for the masses. I thought 140 characters is useless for conversation, but a reasonable length for a title and link.
Definitely got that prediction wrong.
Definitely got that prediction wrong.
No you weren't wrong. It's still largely useless for conversation. It's great for bandwagoning, trolling, angry mobs etc.
We didn't make the message less noisy to fit into 140 chars, we just removed most of the substance to make it fit.
We didn't make the message less noisy to fit into 140 chars, we just removed most of the substance to make it fit.
Pre-algorithm Facebook was quite good for getting a snapshot of what people did gossip about.
However Zuckerberg could not allow his lusers to rank content, so they added som opaque algorithm to serve whatever they wanted us to see instead.
I have not used Twitter to any extent, but have they done something similar?
However Zuckerberg could not allow his lusers to rank content, so they added som opaque algorithm to serve whatever they wanted us to see instead.
I have not used Twitter to any extent, but have they done something similar?
What are some of the services that are trying to make this process as automated and user-friendly as possible, ideally for people who have no idea how to host or manage their own web site?
I'm thinking about the people who have no idea how to register a domain name, find hosting, etc. let alone federate their content to various social media services, so instead they use FB / Twitter / etc. as a substitute.
What (paid, non-ad-supported) services offer POSSE but take care of everything for you?
I'm thinking about the people who have no idea how to register a domain name, find hosting, etc. let alone federate their content to various social media services, so instead they use FB / Twitter / etc. as a substitute.
What (paid, non-ad-supported) services offer POSSE but take care of everything for you?
That wiki behind the link has quite a bit of depth to it, including answers to your question, so it's worth searching it.
Anyway:
- for a full service see, for example, https://withknown.com/
- for WordPress plugins: https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Plugins#POSSE_Plugins
- one can also use services like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc to do this, see https://indieweb.org/2020/West/webmentions-and-automation for more
- there's https://brid.gy/about#publishing
... aand a lot more.
Anyway:
- for a full service see, for example, https://withknown.com/
- for WordPress plugins: https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Plugins#POSSE_Plugins
- one can also use services like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc to do this, see https://indieweb.org/2020/West/webmentions-and-automation for more
- there's https://brid.gy/about#publishing
... aand a lot more.
Seconding this: the protocol-ish things to learn about would be microformats2 and webmentions, and then Bridgy can POSSE from anything that supports those (someone probably has a premade WP install by now, lots of folks use static sites but they take more tweaking)
The first thing that comes to mind to me is WPEngine or other high-quality hosted Wordpress solution. You can install a plugin (from the web console, it's very easy) to post to social media, and there's another plugin to cross-post to Medium if that's your bag.
EDIT: I was wrong about Medium. They sunset that a couple years ago. You can use their import tool explicitly, or manually copy your post in and set a canonical link to your blog. That sucks.
EDIT: I was wrong about Medium. They sunset that a couple years ago. You can use their import tool explicitly, or manually copy your post in and set a canonical link to your blog. That sucks.
I think Micro.blog does some of this for Twitter? Or if not, it plugs into Bridgy? https://micro.blog/ https://brid.gy/
You could probably leverage Buffer for this. They mostly target scheduled social media posts.
buffer.com
buffer.com
Yes and no. Buffer and Hootsuite are 2 players in this game, both allowing to publish or schedule posts based on updates to an RSS feed you configure. Most blogging engines (WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo) come with RSS feed publishing by default.
The tricky part here is the quality of the posts will be bad. Each social network has its own social mores and taboos. Some examples:
Fediverse you refer to Twitter as "birdsite". Anything automated here, unless explicitly called out as a bot account, tends to get ignored as low quality.
Facebook does posts in long-form.
Twitter can thread it to be long-form, but each tweet needs to stand on its own with contributing to the overall narrative. Basic pagination type of splitting sticks out.
LinkedIn... I don't know anyone who posts there that isn't trying to artificially puff themselves up in corporate culture, promote their product/service, or some combination. I'm truly unsure what a "quality" post on there looks like, so go wild.
Basically, posting "<post-title> (<link>)" is probably the most ubiquitous, low effort ways of cross-posting your content but... it's pretty universally understood that it's low quality content and not likely to accomplish the originally intended syndication.
The tricky part here is the quality of the posts will be bad. Each social network has its own social mores and taboos. Some examples:
Fediverse you refer to Twitter as "birdsite". Anything automated here, unless explicitly called out as a bot account, tends to get ignored as low quality.
Facebook does posts in long-form.
Twitter can thread it to be long-form, but each tweet needs to stand on its own with contributing to the overall narrative. Basic pagination type of splitting sticks out.
LinkedIn... I don't know anyone who posts there that isn't trying to artificially puff themselves up in corporate culture, promote their product/service, or some combination. I'm truly unsure what a "quality" post on there looks like, so go wild.
Basically, posting "<post-title> (<link>)" is probably the most ubiquitous, low effort ways of cross-posting your content but... it's pretty universally understood that it's low quality content and not likely to accomplish the originally intended syndication.
I think this is a pretty pragmatic approach to decentralization on the web since it’s achievable now. I like it.
A bit old (mentions tumblr) but always a good idea to own your content.
It's the perennial tradeoff: do you want reach or ownership. Of course, you want both, but getting reach from your own site takes effort, time or money (or all three). Platforms like Twitter, etc, allow you to leverage their reach, but then take ownership of the content (at least the form of content you put on their site, which may include excerpts or links or user click data).
It's the perennial tradeoff: do you want reach or ownership. Of course, you want both, but getting reach from your own site takes effort, time or money (or all three). Platforms like Twitter, etc, allow you to leverage their reach, but then take ownership of the content (at least the form of content you put on their site, which may include excerpts or links or user click data).
People still use tumblr.
People still use Myspace...
They don’t “take ownership”. For one thing, it isn’t entirely clear what the term is supposed to entail. It probably refers to that perennial complaint about TOS at such sites, that tend to go a bit overboard and are then misunderstood/represented as some nefarious ploy to make sweet bank with people’s memes when, in what some describe as ‘reality’, they do need some sort of license to show the photo you uploaded.
I recently deleted some things on medium that I wrote years ago and had zero trouble doing it. Try that in some arrangement where you really grant ‘ownership’. “Hello Microsoft, would you please remove the background animation from the BSOD”.
What is really more of a technical detail, the domain name of the site serving some content, seems to take on outsized importance for some people. As far as I can tell, this are not actual creators of content of the sort where it would start being lucrative to swindle them out of ownership.
Case in point: AMP. If Google had, from the beginning, made it possible for AMP content to be served from the publisher’s (sub)domain, opposition on HN would have likely been half as fierce, or less. As we now know with some certainty, AMP really was a ploy to screw over the competition. It’s quite excellent that it failed, but it did so mostly due to people falsely believing they are getting screwed over due to this implementation detail, when really it was competing ad networks who were getting the wrong end of the stick, but wouldn’t have been in any position to stop it except anti-trust litigation.
I recently deleted some things on medium that I wrote years ago and had zero trouble doing it. Try that in some arrangement where you really grant ‘ownership’. “Hello Microsoft, would you please remove the background animation from the BSOD”.
What is really more of a technical detail, the domain name of the site serving some content, seems to take on outsized importance for some people. As far as I can tell, this are not actual creators of content of the sort where it would start being lucrative to swindle them out of ownership.
Case in point: AMP. If Google had, from the beginning, made it possible for AMP content to be served from the publisher’s (sub)domain, opposition on HN would have likely been half as fierce, or less. As we now know with some certainty, AMP really was a ploy to screw over the competition. It’s quite excellent that it failed, but it did so mostly due to people falsely believing they are getting screwed over due to this implementation detail, when really it was competing ad networks who were getting the wrong end of the stick, but wouldn’t have been in any position to stop it except anti-trust litigation.
It's not so much that they take ownership, more that they choose who can see it, and can remove it arbitrarily from the web.
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+5 for the posse acroymn.
POSSE is also Finnish TV show with the Dudesons hosting it :D
It’s also a software product by a company named Computronix.
Though I really wouldn't recommend trying to use it for blogging.
Therefore, recently people have been writing threads with a link to post at end of thread. The reason simply is that platforms want people to remain on the platform for longer periods of time.
Instagram doesn't even allow you to have a link in your post. Just in the profile.