4 ms·

POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

414 points by tosh 8mo ago

kleiba 8mo ago
Nice that we have a name now for something that's pretty much standard and common practice. Not that we necessarily needed a name, but it's still nice to have one.
- snowhy 8mo ago
  Agreed, and good to know other people also doing similar processes
- kitd 8mo ago
  > now The idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier. Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.
- azangru 8mo ago
  > something that's pretty much standard and common practice Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
  - kleiba 8mo ago
    The idea is not that you necessarily write a Twitter-length post on your website - you can write a full blog post, but then post links back to that post on social media.
nclin_ 8mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- Brajeshwar 8mo ago
  Well, this pops up pretty often and we all like it. I think about 10 years or so.
throwingcookies 8mo ago
[flagged]
- junto 8mo ago
  Edited as suggested.
  - jcattle 8mo ago
    I also don't think most people are here for unnecessary personal attacks. Flag and move on.
    - junto 8mo ago
      Agreed. Edited to remove the snarky puerility reference.
tomaytotomato 8mo ago
I've always liked this idea. However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed. It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g. 1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel) 2. DCS adds domain to those topics 3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed) You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals. e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles. This is just spit balling.
- Pooge 8mo ago
  Didn't you just describe a social media feed? The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).
  - tomaytotomato 8mo ago
    Yes and no A social media feed implies 1(n) curated by 1 algorithm hosted on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram What I was thinking is: - foo.social - bar.social (tech curations) - java.bar.social (sub curated Java list) All these DCS (domain content servers) would be polled by your own local client Your client can then aggregate or organise how it shows this feed e.g. I could have a trending aggregator for situations where a blog post is shown on multiple domains (sort of shows virality)
nicbou 8mo ago
I follow this approach. It's mostly because I want to own the land I build on. It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort. It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  > It works well, but it's hard to automate That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
  - input_sh 8mo ago
    I don't agree with your first point at all, posting on other platforms is trivial and there's what must be hundreds of post scheduling options you can hook into an RSS feed. Here's a completely open source one that you have to spend a lot of time configuring API keys for, but then it just works: https://postiz.com/ https://postiz.com/ What makes it difficult is all of the quirks you have to account for. For the most trivial example, Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, but it's 300 on Bluesky, 500 on Threads, and on Mastodon it is whatever your instance wants it to be. For another quirk, I have like a side-project in which I publish snippets of DJs playing copyrighted music, and while I can post those videos on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube without worrying about copyright, I am like 99% confident my website would be instantly delisted from all the search engines if I used the POSSE strategy for that use case. I agree with your second point that getting anything useful out of it (as in traffic to the source) is pretty much impossible. On Instagram you can only do that via stories, but you can't automate it, because you need Instagram's story editor to add a link to the story. On TikTok you can't even put a link-in-bio until you reach a 1000 followers. On Twitter you might as well not bother, as the medium itself prefers completely unsourced claims. As for Facebook, I honestly don't even know why anyone would bother with Facebook these days, it's completely irrelevant.
matsemann 8mo ago
I like when I read something, and it has links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. Most blogs don't have a very active comment field, and if I'm reading it a few days late, it's nice to still be able to find other's thoughts on the matter.
- rglullis 8mo ago
  > links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web. There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.
  - chrisweekly 8mo ago
    Linking and discovery, use of AP, etc, are well and good for a pub/sub model -- but you're replying to someone interested in extended discussion / commentary and community (such as we enjoy here on HN). Flatly asserting "There shouldn't be a 'main' discussion" kind of dismisses their stated desire out of hand -- though as I (re)consider it (as I compose this comment) I think you have a valid point. The POSSE approach implies scattered discussions, almost by definition; posting a link to your blog post on HN or some other site invites discussion on each of those forums, by design. And yeah, the proliferation of siloed communities, each designed to pull users in and keep them there, poses some meaningful challenges to certain visions for what the web could be. I definitely agree that links matter, and the idea of POSSE has always resonated. People should have a space of their own to share whatever is of most interest and meaning to them. I really like Derek Sivers' take on this w/ his personal site: https://sive.rs/ti https://sive.rs/ti
janalsncm 8mo ago
A cool feature for the small web would be: 1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS 2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc). 3. I can go to those places to talk about it. Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.
- foo42 8mo ago
  I've never implemented it, but I think WebMentions was supposed to enable this
- miladyincontrol 8mo ago
  Agreed. The feeds I want to see blogging on is my RSS reader, not just constantly dumped onto social media feeds unless someone is explicitly bringing it up to talk about a post in general. If its just announcing a post exists, it feels spammy. Finding external conversations about posts obviously is a bit more complicated but also if I actually care to see if discussion ever happened, I do so by searching the url. Something that linking via permashortlinks impairs.
rednafi 8mo ago
I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums. But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy. Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer. If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me. [1]: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com
- alemwjsl 8mo ago
  Nice blog, thanks for this one: https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/ https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/. Well written - I only need to read that once and now remembered it.
- avsm 8mo ago
  > If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout There are quite a few useful linkbacks: - The social urls (bluesky, mastodon, twitter, linkedin, hn, lobsters etc) are just in my Yaml frontmatter as a key - Then there's standard.site which is an ATProto registration that gets an article into that ecosystem https://standard-search.octet-stream.net https://standard-search.octet-stream.net - And for longer articles I get a DOI from https://rogue-scholar.org https://rogue-scholar.org (the above URL is also https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46 https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46) which gets it a bit more metadata. On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
  - rednafi 8mo ago
    Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.
maelito 8mo ago
Strange to not see the "atproto" term on that page.
- gucci-on-fleek 8mo ago
  Not that strange, the site is from 2016 [0], while ATproto is from 2022 [1]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb.... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol
tomhow 8mo ago
Previously... Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments) POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments) POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments) Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)
- ui301 8mo ago
  I like the well-working acronym of its opposite, PESOS - https://indieweb.org/PESOS https://indieweb.org/PESOS. To me, it feels like Star Wars' rebellion, in a struggle against the big tech (big data, big relationship, big dopamine) empire. POSSE? This is the way.
aledevv 8mo ago
[dead]
theshrike79 8mo ago
I don't post stuff on a blog, but I do have replies to common arguments written down in Obsidian. I can just copy stuff from there, edit a bit and post.
OuterVale 8mo ago
I follow the opposite with PESOS: Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. Work really nicely as I've got some automation and systems in place that allow me to maintain a full firehose of all my posts and notable actions across the web on my own site. Then I can sort through them and reference them (which I do frequently) with ease. I do recommend.
- chrisweekly 8mo ago
  Thanks for posting, Declan! I just checked out your site (https://vale.rocks https://vale.rocks) and it's inspiring. Have an awesome day!
  - OuterVale 8mo ago
    Cheers, Chris! Thanks for checking it out. Hope your day is equally wonderful.
ui301 8mo ago
RSS is a refreshingly simple way (and thus, trustworthy) of taking back control over what we see in a world of algorithmic "curation" (i.e. mixing in ads and manipulation, and taking away things that would interest us).
MrOrelliOReilly 8mo ago
I like the principle, but I also find that we software folk commonly mistake the creation of a website as the goal, rather than the production of "content" (e.g. blog posts). I spent years trying to publish a blog and continually getting derailed building the ultimate static website. Recently I switched to a Substack hosted on my own subdomain, and now I'm finally writing. At least I still own the subdomain.
- matsemann 8mo ago
  Hah, reminds of trying to make a blog as a teenager, 20+ years ago. Built my own CMS in PHP with various features. But never got further than having a few lines of text in the draft state. Most of the time was actually spent on having rounded corners (border-radius didn't exist) with some kinda of glass effect for a cool look (inspired by the then unreleased Windows Longhorn). And named my tool the generic name Publish-it, because publi-shit was funny.
CrociDB 8mo ago
I think it's funny that "POSSE" in Portuguese means "ownership". :)
sdoering 8mo ago
Interesting that the article missed POSSE party by Justin Searls [1] in their tools section. [1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party
- Hackbraten 8mo ago
  It’s in the article.
cubefox 8mo ago
I wonder whether this actually works: > Q: Do we need to worry about search engines penalizing apparently duplicate posts? > A: That's why the POSSE copies SHOULD always link back to the originals. So that search engines can infer that the copies are just copies. Ideally POSSE copies on silos should use rel-canonical to link back to the originals, but even without explicit rel-canonical, the explicit link back to the original is a strong hint that it is an original.
merelysounds 8mo ago
I do this, my site is in my profile description. However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque. That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.
- chrismorgan 8mo ago
  Yeah, I’m happy to just call permashortlinks a bad idea, seldom warranted historically and roughly never now. The article offers no explanation about why to use permashortlinks—what looks to be “a few reasons why” is actually a few reasons why to link to the original (rather than copying and pasting the contents), nothing to do with the permashortlink practice. https://indieweb.org/permashortlink https://indieweb.org/permashortlink does give a few reasons, but they’re bunk. “More reliable in email”? Not meaningfully so. “Quicker to recall / copy due to size”? Not typically a concern. Maybe a nice-to-have, but you can consider adjusting your URL style, then it can be even better. “Less effort to manually enter”? Repeat of the previous point. And it doesn’t address the problems of the permashortlink. Cost. Diluting across different domains. Having something different to maintain and remember. Don’t do separate permashortlinks. Just fix your regular links to not be bad.
taurusnoises 8mo ago
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.
- fsflover 8mo ago
  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.
  - taurusnoises 8mo ago
    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.
    - 1dom 8mo ago
      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.
benwerd 8mo ago
I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating. If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.
- roywashere 8mo ago
  I created https://tildeweb.nl https://tildeweb.nl just for this
jacknews 8mo ago
Recommended stack for this? Wordpress? I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc. Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?
- CharlieDigital 8mo ago
  > Recommended stack for this? Wordpress? I have some old Wordpress sites around as well as sites hosted in Firebase and GitHub. I'd recommend the latter two because Wordpress is a bit of a pain to maintain on an ongoing basis. It has a relatively large attack area and over the two decades I've operated it, I've had multiple times that malware made its way in via various channels. I'd move my WP sites, but I'm also too lazy to convert everything over to Astro (one day, I'll tackle this with an agent). - GitHub pages is a really nice DX. I have one example here: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/blob/main/.github/workflows/vitepress-gh-pages.yml#L55-L66 https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... with a custom CNAME: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/blob/main/CNAME https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... - Firebase hosting is generally free and I think the DX is generally good, but you will be charged for large spikes in traffic. I deploy an Astro published blog like this: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-deploy.sh https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-d...
leontloveless 8mo ago
[dead]
tfrancisl 8mo ago
If I werent more critical, I would have read this as an astroturf by big tech sort of thing. Like "it's inevitable that big tech will win, and so therefore syndicate everywhere or you have lost the game." I dont really get what game we're playing though. Why do I care if my friend who only uses Facebook sees my blog posts? What do I get from that other than the feeling of a maybe-connection (much like their criticism of federated networks - youre hoping for a future where this works out for you.) I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.
- 1dom 8mo ago
  > I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere. This is an interesting view point and I agree and disagree. I imagine people are split. There are clearly people who put stuff on the web and want to get it into all eyeballs whether those eyeballs want it or not. I see the logic and appeal behind that: if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? If you don't want everyone to read what you're writing, why put it on the Web of all places? In reality though, the older I get, the more fear I have about posting online, especially on a personal website, through fear of being rude, or imposing, or coming across like some sort of narcissistic influencer. It feels like a sign of self awareness and maturity to believe that not everyone wants to read what you have to say.
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    >if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? I write in public so that there’s a time stamped publicly accessible record of my opinion that I can reference quickly for people I’m communicating with. It’s like a public ledger I don’t really care how many people read my writing because it’s illegible to 99.999999% of humans (I’d guess there are about 7000 ppl on earth who could grok my work). Not everything is for everyone. Just because I publish doesn’t mean I want everyone to read my stuff
cdrnsf 8mo ago
I built a syndication service for my site, though it only supports Mastodon. Each supported type has a toggle to syndicate out and, on success, a timestamp is displayed to note when it was syndicated after which the toggle is also displayed. There's an RSS and JSON feed for each collection and a combined feed as well.
kelvinjps10 8mo ago
for platforms that don't let you post links directly, like Reddit, where links are disabled in most subreddits unless they're major sites. What I do is post the full content of my article, and put something like if you want to read it, on my website, here is the link, or subscribe to get new posts and receive my newsletter. Most people won't visit the site or subscribe, but the people who really like it will do it.
dewey 8mo ago
I try to do that all the time, I've build a plugin for my blog framework (Kirby: https://plugins.getkirby.com/dewey/kirby-posse https://plugins.getkirby.com/dewey/kirby-posse) that does that and cross posts it to Bluesky and Mastodon automatically.
wink 8mo ago
I hated this (so far) for any microblog-related things where I tried it. That was mostly many years ago with Twitter. To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother. On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
spankalee 8mo ago
I do this with long blog posts, but not short tweet-like things. That feels ok some of the times as most of the micro-posts are throw-away, but sometimes I do make some posts I refer back to and would like to keep better ownership of. So I've been thinking of updating my site and habits to center around running my own ATProto PDS and publishing my blog posts there, with my blog just being my web front end to my PDS. Then I could use that same PDS for Bluesky, photos, etc. and self-host a wide variety of things with an interoperable social layer.
ThinkBeat 8mo ago
SO this is what pretty much all media does these days right? Post an article on the newspaper, substack, wherever and then a a link to it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Blue and wherever else.
Wyatt443 8mo ago
[dead]

414 points by tosh 8mo ago

Nice that we have a name now for something that's pretty much standard and common practice. Not that we necessarily needed a name, but it's still nice to have one.

snowhy 8mo ago
Agreed, and good to know other people also doing similar processes
kitd 8mo ago
> now The idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier. Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.
azangru 8mo ago
> something that's pretty much standard and common practice Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
- kleiba 8mo ago
  The idea is not that you necessarily write a Twitter-length post on your website - you can write a full blog post, but then post links back to that post on social media.

nclin_ 8mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
Brajeshwar 8mo ago
Well, this pops up pretty often and we all like it. I think about 10 years or so.

throwingcookies 8mo ago

[flagged]

junto 8mo ago
Edited as suggested.
- jcattle 8mo ago
  I also don't think most people are here for unnecessary personal attacks. Flag and move on.
  - junto 8mo ago
    Agreed. Edited to remove the snarky puerility reference.

tomaytotomato 8mo ago

I've always liked this idea. However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed. It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g. 1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel) 2. DCS adds domain to those topics 3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed) You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals. e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles. This is just spit balling.

Pooge 8mo ago
Didn't you just describe a social media feed? The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).
- tomaytotomato 8mo ago
  Yes and no A social media feed implies 1(n) curated by 1 algorithm hosted on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram What I was thinking is: - foo.social - bar.social (tech curations) - java.bar.social (sub curated Java list) All these DCS (domain content servers) would be polled by your own local client Your client can then aggregate or organise how it shows this feed e.g. I could have a trending aggregator for situations where a blog post is shown on multiple domains (sort of shows virality)

nicbou 8mo ago

I follow this approach. It's mostly because I want to own the land I build on. It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort. It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.

theshrike79 8mo ago
> It works well, but it's hard to automate That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
- input_sh 8mo ago
  I don't agree with your first point at all, posting on other platforms is trivial and there's what must be hundreds of post scheduling options you can hook into an RSS feed. Here's a completely open source one that you have to spend a lot of time configuring API keys for, but then it just works: https://postiz.com/ https://postiz.com/ What makes it difficult is all of the quirks you have to account for. For the most trivial example, Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, but it's 300 on Bluesky, 500 on Threads, and on Mastodon it is whatever your instance wants it to be. For another quirk, I have like a side-project in which I publish snippets of DJs playing copyrighted music, and while I can post those videos on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube without worrying about copyright, I am like 99% confident my website would be instantly delisted from all the search engines if I used the POSSE strategy for that use case. I agree with your second point that getting anything useful out of it (as in traffic to the source) is pretty much impossible. On Instagram you can only do that via stories, but you can't automate it, because you need Instagram's story editor to add a link to the story. On TikTok you can't even put a link-in-bio until you reach a 1000 followers. On Twitter you might as well not bother, as the medium itself prefers completely unsourced claims. As for Facebook, I honestly don't even know why anyone would bother with Facebook these days, it's completely irrelevant.

matsemann 8mo ago

I like when I read something, and it has links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. Most blogs don't have a very active comment field, and if I'm reading it a few days late, it's nice to still be able to find other's thoughts on the matter.

rglullis 8mo ago
> links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web. There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.
- chrisweekly 8mo ago
  Linking and discovery, use of AP, etc, are well and good for a pub/sub model -- but you're replying to someone interested in extended discussion / commentary and community (such as we enjoy here on HN). Flatly asserting "There shouldn't be a 'main' discussion" kind of dismisses their stated desire out of hand -- though as I (re)consider it (as I compose this comment) I think you have a valid point. The POSSE approach implies scattered discussions, almost by definition; posting a link to your blog post on HN or some other site invites discussion on each of those forums, by design. And yeah, the proliferation of siloed communities, each designed to pull users in and keep them there, poses some meaningful challenges to certain visions for what the web could be. I definitely agree that links matter, and the idea of POSSE has always resonated. People should have a space of their own to share whatever is of most interest and meaning to them. I really like Derek Sivers' take on this w/ his personal site: https://sive.rs/ti https://sive.rs/ti

janalsncm 8mo ago

A cool feature for the small web would be: 1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS 2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc). 3. I can go to those places to talk about it. Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.

foo42 8mo ago
I've never implemented it, but I think WebMentions was supposed to enable this
miladyincontrol 8mo ago
Agreed. The feeds I want to see blogging on is my RSS reader, not just constantly dumped onto social media feeds unless someone is explicitly bringing it up to talk about a post in general. If its just announcing a post exists, it feels spammy. Finding external conversations about posts obviously is a bit more complicated but also if I actually care to see if discussion ever happened, I do so by searching the url. Something that linking via permashortlinks impairs.

rednafi 8mo ago

I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums. But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy. Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer. If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me. [1]: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com

alemwjsl 8mo ago
Nice blog, thanks for this one: https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/ https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/. Well written - I only need to read that once and now remembered it.
avsm 8mo ago
> If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout There are quite a few useful linkbacks: - The social urls (bluesky, mastodon, twitter, linkedin, hn, lobsters etc) are just in my Yaml frontmatter as a key - Then there's standard.site which is an ATProto registration that gets an article into that ecosystem https://standard-search.octet-stream.net https://standard-search.octet-stream.net - And for longer articles I get a DOI from https://rogue-scholar.org https://rogue-scholar.org (the above URL is also https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46 https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46) which gets it a bit more metadata. On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
- rednafi 8mo ago
  Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.

maelito 8mo ago

Strange to not see the "atproto" term on that page.

gucci-on-fleek 8mo ago
Not that strange, the site is from 2016 [0], while ATproto is from 2022 [1]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb.... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol

tomhow 8mo ago

Previously... Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments) POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments) POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments) Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)

ui301 8mo ago
I like the well-working acronym of its opposite, PESOS - https://indieweb.org/PESOS https://indieweb.org/PESOS. To me, it feels like Star Wars' rebellion, in a struggle against the big tech (big data, big relationship, big dopamine) empire. POSSE? This is the way.

aledevv 8mo ago

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theshrike79 8mo ago

I don't post stuff on a blog, but I do have replies to common arguments written down in Obsidian. I can just copy stuff from there, edit a bit and post.

OuterVale 8mo ago

I follow the opposite with PESOS: Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. Work really nicely as I've got some automation and systems in place that allow me to maintain a full firehose of all my posts and notable actions across the web on my own site. Then I can sort through them and reference them (which I do frequently) with ease. I do recommend.

chrisweekly 8mo ago
Thanks for posting, Declan! I just checked out your site (https://vale.rocks https://vale.rocks) and it's inspiring. Have an awesome day!
- OuterVale 8mo ago
  Cheers, Chris! Thanks for checking it out. Hope your day is equally wonderful.

ui301 8mo ago

RSS is a refreshingly simple way (and thus, trustworthy) of taking back control over what we see in a world of algorithmic "curation" (i.e. mixing in ads and manipulation, and taking away things that would interest us).

MrOrelliOReilly 8mo ago

I like the principle, but I also find that we software folk commonly mistake the creation of a website as the goal, rather than the production of "content" (e.g. blog posts). I spent years trying to publish a blog and continually getting derailed building the ultimate static website. Recently I switched to a Substack hosted on my own subdomain, and now I'm finally writing. At least I still own the subdomain.

matsemann 8mo ago
Hah, reminds of trying to make a blog as a teenager, 20+ years ago. Built my own CMS in PHP with various features. But never got further than having a few lines of text in the draft state. Most of the time was actually spent on having rounded corners (border-radius didn't exist) with some kinda of glass effect for a cool look (inspired by the then unreleased Windows Longhorn). And named my tool the generic name Publish-it, because publi-shit was funny.

CrociDB 8mo ago

I think it's funny that "POSSE" in Portuguese means "ownership". :)

sdoering 8mo ago

Interesting that the article missed POSSE party by Justin Searls [1] in their tools section. [1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party

Hackbraten 8mo ago
It’s in the article.

cubefox 8mo ago

I wonder whether this actually works: > Q: Do we need to worry about search engines penalizing apparently duplicate posts? > A: That's why the POSSE copies SHOULD always link back to the originals. So that search engines can infer that the copies are just copies. Ideally POSSE copies on silos should use rel-canonical to link back to the originals, but even without explicit rel-canonical, the explicit link back to the original is a strong hint that it is an original.

merelysounds 8mo ago

I do this, my site is in my profile description. However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque. That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.

chrismorgan 8mo ago
Yeah, I’m happy to just call permashortlinks a bad idea, seldom warranted historically and roughly never now. The article offers no explanation about why to use permashortlinks—what looks to be “a few reasons why” is actually a few reasons why to link to the original (rather than copying and pasting the contents), nothing to do with the permashortlink practice. https://indieweb.org/permashortlink https://indieweb.org/permashortlink does give a few reasons, but they’re bunk. “More reliable in email”? Not meaningfully so. “Quicker to recall / copy due to size”? Not typically a concern. Maybe a nice-to-have, but you can consider adjusting your URL style, then it can be even better. “Less effort to manually enter”? Repeat of the previous point. And it doesn’t address the problems of the permashortlink. Cost. Diluting across different domains. Having something different to maintain and remember. Don’t do separate permashortlinks. Just fix your regular links to not be bad.

taurusnoises 8mo ago

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.

fsflover 8mo ago
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.
- taurusnoises 8mo ago
  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.
  - 1dom 8mo ago
    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.

benwerd 8mo ago

I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating. If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.

roywashere 8mo ago
I created https://tildeweb.nl https://tildeweb.nl just for this

jacknews 8mo ago

Recommended stack for this? Wordpress? I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc. Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?

CharlieDigital 8mo ago
> Recommended stack for this? Wordpress? I have some old Wordpress sites around as well as sites hosted in Firebase and GitHub. I'd recommend the latter two because Wordpress is a bit of a pain to maintain on an ongoing basis. It has a relatively large attack area and over the two decades I've operated it, I've had multiple times that malware made its way in via various channels. I'd move my WP sites, but I'm also too lazy to convert everything over to Astro (one day, I'll tackle this with an agent). - GitHub pages is a really nice DX. I have one example here: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/blob/main/.github/workflows/vitepress-gh-pages.yml#L55-L66 https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... with a custom CNAME: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/blob/main/CNAME https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... - Firebase hosting is generally free and I think the DX is generally good, but you will be charged for large spikes in traffic. I deploy an Astro published blog like this: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-deploy.sh https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-d...

leontloveless 8mo ago

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tfrancisl 8mo ago

If I werent more critical, I would have read this as an astroturf by big tech sort of thing. Like "it's inevitable that big tech will win, and so therefore syndicate everywhere or you have lost the game." I dont really get what game we're playing though. Why do I care if my friend who only uses Facebook sees my blog posts? What do I get from that other than the feeling of a maybe-connection (much like their criticism of federated networks - youre hoping for a future where this works out for you.) I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.

1dom 8mo ago
> I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere. This is an interesting view point and I agree and disagree. I imagine people are split. There are clearly people who put stuff on the web and want to get it into all eyeballs whether those eyeballs want it or not. I see the logic and appeal behind that: if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? If you don't want everyone to read what you're writing, why put it on the Web of all places? In reality though, the older I get, the more fear I have about posting online, especially on a personal website, through fear of being rude, or imposing, or coming across like some sort of narcissistic influencer. It feels like a sign of self awareness and maturity to believe that not everyone wants to read what you have to say.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  >if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? I write in public so that there’s a time stamped publicly accessible record of my opinion that I can reference quickly for people I’m communicating with. It’s like a public ledger I don’t really care how many people read my writing because it’s illegible to 99.999999% of humans (I’d guess there are about 7000 ppl on earth who could grok my work). Not everything is for everyone. Just because I publish doesn’t mean I want everyone to read my stuff

cdrnsf 8mo ago

I built a syndication service for my site, though it only supports Mastodon. Each supported type has a toggle to syndicate out and, on success, a timestamp is displayed to note when it was syndicated after which the toggle is also displayed. There's an RSS and JSON feed for each collection and a combined feed as well.

kelvinjps10 8mo ago

for platforms that don't let you post links directly, like Reddit, where links are disabled in most subreddits unless they're major sites. What I do is post the full content of my article, and put something like if you want to read it, on my website, here is the link, or subscribe to get new posts and receive my newsletter. Most people won't visit the site or subscribe, but the people who really like it will do it.

dewey 8mo ago

I try to do that all the time, I've build a plugin for my blog framework (Kirby: https://plugins.getkirby.com/dewey/kirby-posse https://plugins.getkirby.com/dewey/kirby-posse) that does that and cross posts it to Bluesky and Mastodon automatically.

wink 8mo ago

I hated this (so far) for any microblog-related things where I tried it. That was mostly many years ago with Twitter. To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother. On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.

deleted 8mo ago

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spankalee 8mo ago

I do this with long blog posts, but not short tweet-like things. That feels ok some of the times as most of the micro-posts are throw-away, but sometimes I do make some posts I refer back to and would like to keep better ownership of. So I've been thinking of updating my site and habits to center around running my own ATProto PDS and publishing my blog posts there, with my blog just being my web front end to my PDS. Then I could use that same PDS for Bluesky, photos, etc. and self-host a wide variety of things with an interoperable social layer.

ThinkBeat 8mo ago

SO this is what pretty much all media does these days right? Post an article on the newspaper, substack, wherever and then a a link to it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Blue and wherever else.

Wyatt443 8mo ago

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