In 2019 I explained how I was going to decentralise my online presence by cross-posting all my really interesting content to both social media and this blog. Since then I’ve posted all my content here first, and then shared snippets of that everywhere else.
This is not a new idea, of course, and I’ve been preaching variations of this owned-media-first approach for years at the places I’ve worked.
Screenshot of a flow chart from a slide deck. The flowchart shows stories pitched by Jetstar to the media with a wide arrow. A much narrower arrow goes from the media to the audience. Parallel to this is a wide, darker coloured arrow showing stories written on our own platforms. An identically-wide arrow goes from there to the audience, along with a smaller arrow showing stories on our own platforms being picked up by the media.
However this week, thanks to Molly White’s [citation needed] newsletter, I discovered that the phrase that’s been used to describe this approach since 2012 is POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
I thought I’d note that here and share a few interesting and relevant POSSE-related links:
The first item in the ‘Worth a read’ section of [citation needed] ‘Issue 69 – Nice’ (2 Nov 2024) is Molly White’s most recent mention of POSSE.
She talked about this approach in more detail in an earlier edition of her newsletter: ‘POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world’ (27 Sep 2024).
Cory Doctorow is someone who follows the POSSE approach and in his most recent Pluralistic newsletter instalment, ‘Bluesky and enshittification’ (2 Nov 2024), he talks about why he isn’t joining Bluesky.
Here are the IndieWeb wiki articles on ‘POSSE’ and ‘PESOS’ (Publish Everywhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.
Finally, David Pierce wrote a good article in The Verge about POSSE that is worth reading: ‘The poster’s guide to the internet of the future’ (24 Oct 2023).
Close-up photo showing a person typing on a laptop. (@Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash)
Syndicate or post natively?
The one aspect of POSSE I don’t do is the automatic syndication my content to other channels.
While I love using RSS to read content from lots of different sources, I don’t like doing the opposite: using a tool to automatically write content to lots of different sources.
I did use IFFT back in the day to automatically post my Flickr photos to Instagram and Twitter, but I don’t do that anymore.
I enjoy posting natively on the channels I use and, in turn, seeing what everyone else is posting there.
The only automation that comes in handy is Buffer, and that’s to schedule photo posts to Mastodon and Bluesky in the middle of the day when my desktop computer (where all my mirrorless camera photos are saved) is turned off.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it
If you’re someone who wants more ownership of the content you’re putting into various social media walled gardens, I recommend you check out the POSSE approach and join us in a more decentralised web.