Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere

Links Around the Web
21

Well said. I agree with you a lot. I have very similar approach and attitude when it comes to sharing what I published on my website on social media.

A major reason I decided to create my personal website back in 2022 was to gather and compile the stuff I have created on other various online platforms, including social media (mostly Tumblr), such as articles, essays and resources about my favourite niche or obscure video games, so when I want to share them on other online platforms for those who are interested in them, I can just link to my website. I was not aware of the term POSSE at the time, but when I learned about it, I was actually pleasantly surprised to realise that there was a term for the action similar to what I have been doing my sharing these stuff from my website on other online platforms, although I don’t share everything I published on my website on every social media platform I use.

I do not create things to gain more followers or popularity, as I have grown past caring about such things, but I create resources about these niche video games to be helpful (most notably, I wrote the most comprehensive romance guide for Juhani from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the entire internet), so I do want my resources to reach more people who are also interested in these video games. Very few of the intended audience of these niche video game stuff I created have their own websites, so sharing them on social media or other online platform allows my stuff to reach more people, and it did work: there have been people contacting me to ask about these stuff by referring to my website.

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22

I disagree here.

First, I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to be on the social networks in the first place, especially Twitter. Without getting into politics, that site was always the bathroom wall of the Internet.

Second, even on a relatively benign platform like Mastodon, it is easy to lose time scrolling through timelines, whether it’s your own timeline, the local timeline, or the federated firehose. I think the best way to avoid wasting time on the Fediverse is not to be there. It is like Twitter in that regard, which is to be expected since the Fediverse has always imitated Twitter.

Third, is the uptick in readership worth the hassle of dealing with social networks at all? I’m not convinced this is the case.

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23

But security is not a zero-sum game

I absolutely agree on this, 1% improvement is still an improvement in that context.

But I don’t think I agree when it comes for social media. As I said, I do see the benefits of POSSE: expanding reach, gaining more exposure and all that. I also agree with you that if you’re on a social platform anyway it’s not extra work to throw a link in there.

Personally though, I think the drawbacks of POSSE are also worth considering. For example, the thing I care about the most is human connections and interactions. If I were to post my content on Mastodon or Twitter or Threads or any other platform just for the sake of increasing reach I’d then also have to actively monutor those platform because if someone decides to engage with me there (and it’s reasonable for them to assume I want to engage there since i’m actively posting) I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to have that human interaction. Ignoring someone just because I want to increase reach is a dick move in my book.

Also, you’re right in saying that some people need to be nudged but at the same time I think by contributing to social media in that way I’m encouraging something I don’t beleve should be encouraged: doomscroling on social platforms.

It’s not black and white as you correctly pointed out but it’s a matter of pros and cons. And for me personally the cons outweight the pros. But the beauty of the open web is that different people can aproach the same situation differently and I’m all for trying different strategies.

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24

I think what you’re doing is slightly but meaningfully different though. You’re selectively sharing what’s relevant. I think POSSE—the way I interpret it at least—is spreading your content everywhere possible in order to facilitate discovery. Which is honestly no different than spamming at the end of the day.

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25

There are just to many variables here and it makes my brain hurt.

  • What is the intent of the webmaster?
  • Is POSSE being used for commercial or non-commercial purposes?
  • People on social networks are free to unsubscribe or block if they don’t like your posts.
  • Many link blogs use POSSE, because their purpose is to share interesting links…

The list is endless.

Not using POSSE, not using social networks are valid choices but some bloggers want to be read, want to be discovered and they all face the same hurdle: Google is still the gatekeeper. So if POSSE and a judicious use of social networks helps get around the search engine bottleneck then its worth considering. Because doing absolutely zero self promotion means you could spend years being really really lonely. Every webmaster, with a new site or new post faces the questions: “do I want people to see this and how badly do I want people to see this?”

The Web is about links. People will find a way to share links for purposes both benign and foul.

As a final note, from where I sit, POSSE to social networks by humans is a minor sort of spam compared to spam by bots.

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26

Equating sharing your content on networks where people can follow/subscribe to you to spam is quite extreme. I think you’re equating your desire not to be on certain platforms for your own reasons with sharing your content on that platform as being actively bad.

27

Personally, I’m having a difficult time understanding how one’s stuff can be known to the outside world (let alone have interactions) with absolutely nothing but a website. For those of you who run a website and don’t use any social media, how do people find out about your stuff? How did you get started? Did you use social media when you initially started? When did you start your website?

I absolutely love the idea of getting away from social media and everyone having their own website. Sadly, not many can know about your stuff (initially) without social media (unless you are an exceptionally lucky person), and making a website is still so damn hard for most people (it is not that “people aren’t lazy” or “unwilling to learn anything new”, the tools currently out there are still only really usable by experienced programmers).

Some may utilize a lack of social media as a natural “filter”, so that maybe those who care more about social issues and stuff may find a person’s website. In my case, I see my goal as reaching out to people who may not be aware that there is this much better world we could have, and then bringing them into it. So that’s how I see my use of social media.

Ultimately, this is a deeply personal topic, and it really depends on what your goals are. I personally want to get artists to think about a better ecosystem, and I can’t accomplish that with just a website. Maybe you don’t have that kind of a goal and just having a website is enough, and that’s fine! However, it’s not a good idea to be entirely dependent on social media platforms, in case they go down the drain (or cease to exist entirely). That is one of the main reasons why having a website is important.

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28

Equating sharing your content on networks where people can follow/subscribe to you to spam is quite extreme.

I’m not saying that. Maybe I didn’t explained myself right. Auto publishing what are essentially notifications on platforms you’re not active on, that to me is spam.

Because you’re not participating to any conversation that might happen. You’re also not providing actual content.

But if you post a link to your post on Mastodon and you’re also active on mastodon engaging with people that’s totally fine imo.

29

So I can’t properly answer your question because I don’t really have an answer. When I started my blog back in 2017 I did have a Twitter profile (a very quiet one, I think I was posting maybe a few times a week at most) so I was technically on social media.

I can’t remember if I ever posted links to my posts, I probably didn’t because I was never a fan of self promotion. I did have friends who posted them though and that’s usually what happens. Other people who are active on social media end up posting links to my content.

I often hear from people who found my content on Mastodon. I am not on mastodon so someone else has probably posted links to my content on there. But that’s how it should be.

I love to write in response to other people posts and I try to always link to them. That’s a way to help spread content around.

An alternative option is to start your site on a platform that has some social aspects built in like Micro blog or bearblog. That should help discoverability.

Ultimately, this is a deeply personal topic, and it really depends on what your goals are.

Absolutely and it clearly changes depending on the situation. I comment mostly from a personal site perspective. There are no goals attached to that but if you’re an artist and you’re trying to earn a living that’s a different situation.

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30

Hi there.

I’ve been on the fence about signing up here only to respond, but I appreciate the vibe and the discourse I’ve waded through thus far, so forgive me if this is at all awkward.

As the person responsible for the original link, I wanted to share a bit more personal context, particularly given any perspectives on “spam” versus “discoverability.”

I fully recognize that a cabin in the middle of a forest is unlikely to get many visitors, especially if there isn’t a trail to follow. For some people, that may matter little; maybe they like the quiet. Maybe they’re partial to meeting people who have had to put more effort into finding you. For others, the lack of frequent visitors may be disheartening. To say there’s a spectrum is probably reductive, but I think the key element here is understanding what you want out of your public space on the internet.

When I first created an online presence decades ago (oof), I was focused on tech and I actively sought to reach a larger audience. I became friends with people who had their own sites in similar spaces and we shared links and cross-referenced one another whenever opportunities arose. This is well before online advertising had congealed into the monster industry that exists today; connections were smaller, more nimble, and often shared in the form of little 88x31 buttons. Ah, loose tangent, sorry. The important bit here is that at the time, I wanted to broaden reach because the “success” of my site depended on people learning about it and coming back to keep up to date on the parts of tech that I cared about.

By the time I got to college, I transitioned away from tech and the page turned into an online journal. If I hadn’t already owned a domain, I might have signed up for something like LiveJournal, Xanga or any of its competitors. With this shift in scope, the “success” of my site changed dramatically. Now it was no longer about strangers on the internet discovering and reading my thoughts. I put words out into the ether, vague as they often were, because I wanted my IRL friends to see them. I was too afraid or incapable of sharing many things directly, so I’d spin something up and share them online, knowing that I had shared my URL directly with my friends and that they could read. Reaching new people didn’t matter to me.

Then something happened and I disappeared for a long time. Coming back to the space, I started writing again earlier this year. I’m still figuring out what “success” looks like now. I haven’t told any of my old friends that I’m writing again. My wife doesn’t know that I have a public journal. I’m just writing things down and posting them in a space because it feels good. That said, the idea of being seen, understood, recognized, is admittedly tantalizing. It’s why I first took a stab at joining Mastodon and the POSSE approach, even though at the time I hadn’t even heard of the term.

The problem that I experienced is that over time it felt [to me] exactly like spam. I was essentially shouting into a space “NOTICE ME NOTICE ME NOTICE ME,” and this relied on boosting the audience of people who might possibly notice. Put more simply, I needed to find more followers so that my reach would widen further. Now, I could simply focus on writing, but I’m a sucker for gamifying things; in earnest I started thinking about ways that I could encourage viewership. I felt growing pressure and a warping of intent, such that my initial desire to start writing again—which occurred largely in a vacuum—began to twist and buckle.

This doesn’t seem helpful to anyone. Not to myself, nor to the folks who I might subject to attention seeking toots. I recognize that this isn’t a universal truth. It’s simply a recognition of how I felt I was interacting with social media and how it was warping my view of what “success” is for a personal page with no real direction.

I’m still on social media and my URL is still linked in a few places. If discoverability matters, there isn’t a great deal of opportunity left beyond those places I already seeded (for example being listed on blogroll.club). I’m okay with that, but I don’t judge anyone who is positive about POSSE and its downstream effects.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. The short version can be summarized as “Using POSSE as a mechanism for engaging with social media is a net-negative for me, but that isn’t true for everyone.”

All the best,
Courtney

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31

I’m so glad you ultimately decided to join the conversation.

“Using POSSE as a mechanism for engaging with social media is a net-negative for me, but that isn’t true for everyone.”

This is worth repeating, because each person has unique expectations and goals when it comes to a site they run. Like I said in a previous comment, if we’re talking artists trying to get exposure, it’s totally fine to try POSSE the hell out of your own content. What you’re doing is marketing at the end of the day and it’s worth trying all approaches and see which one works for your use case.

32

I don’t object to your experience or anyone else’s. But I think equating any form of sharing what you make with spam (or use any other word that has a negative connotation) is a burden and perception that comes from within. That may make it a terrible experience for you and not right for what you’re trying to do. Where I generally object is when people go from saying, “I feel bad about doing this” to “this process inherently and fundamentally like this.” – it’s externalizing that very personal feeling to the act itself that I personally object to.

It’s ok to not be the kind of person who wants to share your stuff that way, but that doesn’t mean everyone who does gets that same feeling, has that same reaction, or is engaging in a practice that other people feel and respond to negatively.

We often judge ourselves in ways we would never judge other people, and I think a lot of folks in this anti-POSSE conversation are actually extending their own discomfort and self-judgement to the actions of others. There’s a failure to understand the difference in motivations and/or a flippant attitude choosing intentionally charged analogies like SPAM.

Sharing a blog post isn’t pushing a multi-level marketing scheme, but you’d think it is by the way some seem to judge it.

It’s ok to write for yourself. It’s ok to have your stacks of journal in the woods in a cabin that has no locks but really isn’t meant to be found except by the rare errant traveler. Most of us write in public to be, at least in part, in public. Your website doesn’t have to be that for you, but it’s quite normal to make some kind of effort to hope others stop by-- or at least make it a little bit easier for them by posting your address, the hours you’re open, and choosing a location near public transit or with adequate parking.

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33

I think very few people auto-publish to a platform that they don’t have a means and intention to monitor for things like replies. In fact, most people I’ve talked to choose where to syndicate based on places they’re willing to monitor in that way and don’t in places they are not. I would never crosspost to LinkedIn or Nostr or Medium, for example.

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34

As someone often guilty of projection, I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying here, but feel that it may be a bit misdirected if given in response to the quote you shared. If I haven’t been clear, I certainly apologize for any misunderstanding; I’m accusing my own usage and approach of being inherently spammy. I’m intentionally using a negative connotation because I consider it a negative interaction model for me. I found myself encouraged in ways that I consider negative, but yes, that is strongly, if not entirely, reflective of me. If this is being read as me blaming the model itself as a flawed thing, then that’s on me for not being clear enough.

POSSE is not inherently broken, bad, or anything else. It serves a purpose that is at least partially defined by how and why we utilize it. For me, I saw it in the negative, but that doesn’t deny all of the positive benefits that others may experience.

35

Apologies for the confusion I caused by quoting-- what I meant more was that I think your post and follow up emphasize the point I was trying to make in critique of others who picked it up and ran with it and expressed this similar sentiments. I think a lot of language went from, “I feel bad about POSSE because it feels like spamming to me even though I recognize that’s not what it is, but that makes it feel bad for me” to “POSSE is like spamming” all the way to “Actually, POSSE is spamming”.

I’m not sure others took it all the way to the extreme, but as the conversation continued and others contributed, it was like watching a cart on train tracks with stones rolling down a hill and accelerating to an observable end. I just wanted to pump those breaks and say, “This not being a thing you want to do does not imply anything necessarily about its place in the broader environment.”

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36

I thought the difference in motivations were highlighted more than once and I think it was clear that the entire discussion is obviously highly subjective.

Most people are doing it well then! That’s great. As I said, I personally don’t have anything against people wanting to share their content. I am very liberitarian in spirit but also very opinionated but those are just that: my opinions. And I apply them to the way I run my digital life and it’s also what I tell people what I’d do when asked. But as we said many times before, different people have different expectations and it’s fine for them to use different approaches.

As for the SPAM analogy, I used it mostly in the “spammed” sense of the word, the:

send the same message indiscriminately to (a large number of internet users).

Not as in unwanted or malicious or any of that. It’s obvious that a personal blog post is not malicious but spamming it everywhere is something I personally despise. But again, that’s just me and I found a solution to that problem by abandoning social media entirely.

37

Posting on a social media service does not send a message to directly to any user on the internet. It makes your post available to people who choose to follow it, or available to be shown to people who have opted into a feed that provides them with algorithmic posts they may be interested in by their own choice. They are shown posts in a way that is anything but indiscriminate.

Posting on social media is no more “sending a message” than posting on a blog.

38

What social networks have you been frequenting where the algorithm shows people “posts they may be interested in by their own choice”? One of the reasons I refuse to use corporate social media is that none of their algorithms show me stuff from people I follow, but stuff that will annoy me so that I spend more time there and see more ads.

39

I very much disagree with this. My blog post doesn’t have a chance to be surfaced by a trending algorithm and delivered to people without them having to do anything. That’s the fundamental difference.

Like if I open fosstodon right now, the first thing I see are random posts from all over the fediverse in the explore tab that have absolutely nothing to do with the core topic of that instance. And I get that if I subscribe I can probably (maybe?) work my way towards a timeline that’s curated but that fundamental aspect remain: the platform itself is designed to spread content around and not just to deliver it to the people who have decided to receive it.

Same is true for bluesky, and twitter and the rest of social media. But I don’t blame them, the platforms are designed for engagement and that’s the result. We already have a tool designed to deliver just the content to the people who are interested in it: it’s called RSS. Works perfectly.

And again, I’m not saying people should stop using social media or POSSE if they find it valuable. More power to them if those tools are useful in their situations. I’m all for giving people options.

40

I think you’re comparing a non-logged in or first run experience against the actual one. When I open Mastodon on the server I have an account, I see a Home timeline that is just people I’m following in reverse chronological order.

When I open Bluesky when I’m logged in, I see a timeline called Following that is just people I’m following in reverse chronological order. I can seek out other experiences, but it’s not the default.

When I open Threads, I see an algorithmic timeline by default. But I have opted into Threads as a user because I find that valuable. You may not, but the people who want to follow accounts and use those platforms that put algorithmic timelines more at the forefront through revealed preference and opting in get value from getting content they may like being in front of them.

It’s not spam if I sign up for the newsletter.

Also, this is untrue:

My blog post doesn’t have a chance to be surfaced by a trending algorithm and delivered to people without them having to do anything.

This happens all the time when other people post your links on social sites, in a newsletter, or in a blog post. And the people who have content surfaced to them that way are choosing to participate in platforms that operate that way because they want to.

You can choose not to participate for lots of reasons, but I think it’s hyperbolic to the point of being false to equate this to spamming.