2024/Brighton/posse

POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024.

IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Session: POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
When: 2024-03-09 12:15

Participants

POSSE means having a canonical, original copy of your content on your own website, and then syndicating to other platforms like Mastodon, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Medium, Bluesky, etc.
PESOS is the alternative: Post Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site
The philosophical belief behind this is you should own and control your own content. This prevents you losing content when large, corporate platforms shut down, refuse to let you export your content, or shut off their API.

Implementation and Logistics – How do you do this?

IFTTT is a good platform that allows you to setup recipes to move context from A to B
Micro.blog is a platform that does the syndication for you
Jetpack plug-in on WordPress
Having an RSS feed is very useful as a trigger for syndication automation
Brid.gy allows you to auth with your own website, as well as other services, then does the syndication for you. Makes a copy for you to other platforms. Then when other people like, repost, or comment on that post, Bridgy pings back your website with a Webmention It's a "bridge" between silos and your website.
Your website needs to accept Webmentions. Then Brid.gy does the rest.
Adding Webmentions to your static blog: https://janmonschke.com/adding-webmentions-to-your-static-blog/
webmention.io is a service to help setup Web Mentions.

Bridgy Fed is the latest version that turns your website into an ActivityPub instance

A Webmention is a claim that one URL is linking to another URL
You can receive "pings" when another URL links to your URL
Once you receive a "ping" you can decide what to do with it: filter it, display it, etc.

Micropub is another IndieWeb technology that gives you the convenience of a beautiful writing interface, but publishes to your own site.

When posting to closed platforms like LinkedIn and Medium, perhaps only share an excerpt, and add a link at the top of the syndication post linking back to the original. Make clear readers should go to the original

Psychologically feels different to post to a place you own. You get some healthy distance from the dynamics of social media platforms like Twitter.

There are ethical questions about whether it's okay for you to take comments other people might have posted to another platform like Facebook (or whatever), and put them on your own site.
The protocol only defines how it works, not how you use it.