Thanks for sharing that. I agree with the author, there is no universal rule about POSSE, it’s entirely up to the blogger, whatever they feel comfortable with.
I’m starting to lean toward this myself. IMO, it should not be a webmaster’s job to syndicate, especially if their website already provides a RSS feed.
As I think I wrote before, my job’s done once I offer my content via web, email, and rss. I don’t think it’s my job to go chase people around the platforms begging them to read my content.
Even though I see why people want to use the POSSE approach and I can see the benefits, the method itself is no different than annoying spam or advertising. You’re scattering your stuff everywhere hoping people see it. And I’m not a fan of that.
You should trust your content is good enough that it will slowly reach other people eventually. If others will find what you write interesting they’ll post on their platforms and it will spread. Doing it yourself automatically is a bit desperate imo.
But to each their own.
Hm… I see where the original author and other folks are coming from, but I’m happy sharing things. I manually share my blog posts here, on Mastodon, and previously on Cohost. I don’t have enough places that I would consider automating it.
My assumption is that people who follow me (friends, “mutuals,” members of zine/disability/etc communities) might be interested in what I write. (Otherwise why follow me on a text-heavy platform?) It’s been cool to see the resurgence of RSS, but some people still don’t use it.
I’m not trying to grow an audience, just share the things I’m proud of. Likes and reshares/boosts are nice, but since I’m not aiming to get more of them, I don’t find them to be as destructive or distracting. But it was nice that Cohost hid those numbers. Maybe I’ll use Stylus to do so on Mastodon?
Like the author said, it’s a personal choice and everyone’s got different goals. I see POSSE as meeting others where they are. My writing is valuable to someone out there and they just might be on Mastodon. So, I post on Mastodon. Some like RSS so I have an RSS feed. Maybe email will be the method of choice for someone, someday. I see it as an act of service and respect to others and I don’t mind catering.
This is where I’m at with it. Some stuff I don’t syndicate because I just wanted to write something down for me. Other things I feel are part of a wider discussion and should be spread through more avenues. I don’t automate syndication because I feel that it should be a deliberate choice.
Linking from Mastodon somehow got my blog post concerning an extremely narrow overlapping set of interests seen by the intended audience. (It isn’t clear to me that the author in the OP has a good idea of an intended audience.)
The author might not have an intended audience.
I generally don’t. When I write, I am generally either thinking out loud, ranting about something that has annoyed me, or writing the fiction I’d like to buy because literature ain’t Burger King and if you want it written your way you’ve got to write it yourself.
I need not publish at all; I’m just trying to scratch my own itch, but I share it on the off-chance that it might be useful to somebody else, or at least an entertaining bathroom read.
POSSE can be useful when you have a brand new blog and want to build a readership without depending on Google or Bing. Because when you are new you don’t have any inbound links and Google and Bing want you to have them. So POSSE helps you to break the duopoly of the search engines.
And I lost no sleep, spamming Twitter and (at one time) Facebook with my blog postings because I just don’t mind using one commercial Big Tech silo against another big tech silo. That said, I feel a bit worried about cross posting to Mastodon, except that I get more very thoughtful interaction via Masto than any other social network.
I do see a fundamental difference between Email/RSS and Posting on social platforms.
With emails and RSS you’re providing the full content (or at least that’s how it should be) to people so that they can consume the way they prefer. But you’re not attaching anything else to that delivery. You’re not becoming part of a larger collection of content that is aggregated, liked, commented etc.
With POSSE usually what yu’re doing is providing a link to your content. People on Mastodon, Threads etc can’t consume your content there. You’re essentially sending out a notification. But also, you become part of this algorithmic dance where your notification about your post can go viral, can be pushed around, can be interacted with. And you don’t have control over that.
Plus, I do believe that no matter how we want to look at it, social media has done more harm than good to society and human relationships. And so I personally don’t want to take part even passively in that harm. Which is why my site doesn’t even have social media meta tags, it’s why I blocked mastodon parsing and my links should appear as simple text links with no context.
If people want to share my content they can do it, I’m not going to oppose it but I don’t want to actively participate in it. My act of respect, as you put it, is in trying to nudge those people away from social media.
i’m surprised by the response to this! i don’t see the difference between sharing a link in 
Blogroll: Share your blog posts! and sharing a link on mastodon with a blog-related hashtag.
32bit.cafe is as close to a community as you can find on the Internet.
Mastodon isn’t a community to me, but a cacophony. You can post as many links as you want there, but who’s going to click them and venture outside the walled garden?
YMMV, of course.
Well I do see a difference. The share your blog post thread is created, as part of a wider digital space, to do precisely that. The goal there is to collect links and you, as a user, have to actively go in there to find those posts. It’s a lot more intentional.
As @starbreaker said, social platforms, like mastodon, are more like a cacophony. You throw everything inside the same bucket and there’s not a lot of intentionality.
That, and there’s something I think a lot of people advocating for Mastodon or the Fediverse seem to forget or ignore: reverse chronological order is still an algorithm. It’s just a more benign algorithm than the ones used on corporate social platforms.
It’s just a more benign algorithm than the ones used on corporate social platforms.
Technically true although I’d consider that more like a sorting order than anything else. You have to present things in one way or the other once you have a list. It’s either chronologica, alphabetical or random. I’d vote for random. We need more chaos.
Random works better for music, unless you like listening to albums.
Isn’t that also one of those things that’s always up to debate in the music world? Like some people argue that you should respect the order the musician has decided for the album while others don’t care and do whatever? My music culture is non existent and random works for me.
Also, I was reading your “The (Plain Old) Web” and I’m curious to know your opinion on a thought I had. In there you wrote
If I did start a newsletter, it would have a low subscription fee. I wouldn’t charge because I need the money. I would charge the fee as a convenience tax levied on people who can’t or won’t use a feed reader.
And I’m now wondering if the burden to convert RSS to Email should fall on the reader and not the writer. For example, services like https://feedrabbit.com exists for this exact reason.
And I’ve seen plenty of people doing the Email → RSS integration. So why do we assume that the opposite should be done by the webmaster? I offer my blog via email to some 120 or so people at the moment and it’s all done manually but i’m wondering if I should stop and let the people sort that out themselves if they want to get my content in their inbox.
I think it’s tempting to make this an all or nothing thing similarly to the way people think about security, which in my opinion is misguided. As an example, I used to live with a guy where we had bikes and sometimes kept them on the porch. He was worried about them being stolen, so I suggested we get chains for them. He said that wouldn’t matter because you could easily cut the chains with store bought metal cutters.
But security is not a zero-sum game, so the goal isn’t to stop every thief in existence (which is impossible), but to simply stop 99% of them. Almost no one walks down the street with metal cutters on the regular, and since most bike thefts are spontaneous, chaining your bikes up will keep them safe 99% of the time.
I think it’s the same for finding engagement and readers. There are always going to be those who won’t read what you write, or those who need to be “nudged” by seeing your stuff thrown in their feed on social media. Most of us here aren’t really concerned about those readers. But if you’re on the social networks anyway, or it’s no extra work to throw a link into Twitter from time to time, then you’ll pick up that many more readers each time you do it.
If it’s too stressful, sure, but most of the time I figure I’m there anyway, so what do I have to lose? I ignore negative feedback anyway. I could also leave constructing the RSS feeds to the readers, but that’s a few more who just won’t end up coming back, either because of lack of technical skill, or lack of time.
You could also think of it in terms of accessibility–the more ways you offer to others for reading what you write, the wider an audience you’ll be able to reach. People interact differently with content depending on whether they have disabilites, are on metered connections, have more limited devices, don’t speak English, etc.
Anyways, I’m mainly trying to throw out alternate views here. Ultimately it’s up to the individual webmaster what they want to support and why, and that’s what makes owning your own website so much more powerful than simply “following the rules” made by social media.
To me, one of the reasons I buy music on CDs is so that I can do as I please with it. Some albums do all but require that you listen to the whole thing in sequence, especially concept albums and rock operas. Others tend to have one or two standout tracks, while the rest don’t necessarily appeal. Sometimes I like to shuffle a playlist of my favorite songs. Sometimes I’ll listen to an entire album in order. It’s my prerogative either way.
To answer your question about RSS and email: I’m generally of the opinion that if you want RSS in your inbox, you should use services like Feedrabbit. But, let’s face it, many people won’t. They want convenience. They want their hands held. They want everything done for them with no effort on their part. They don’t necessarily want to learn, or think.
So, if I’m going to start a newsletter to cater to such people, I’m certainly not going to run it for free. But maybe I’m just in a crap mood today.
People expect webmasters to do everything and they expect increased exposure to be an adequate reward for the effort. This was the case when I was getting ready to publish my first novel in 2013. It wasn’t enough to have a website, because “people don’t visit websites anymore”. It seems like the whole point of POSSE is for the webmaster to spam platforms with links to their website in order to draw more attention.
My suggestion is if catering to those 120 people doesn’t provide sufficient reward to justify the effort, then don’t bother. You don’t owe anybody anything, and a webmaster who provides RSS feeds has done their part to make syndication possible.