[HN Gopher] POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
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POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
Author : pabs3
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-11-05 05:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (indieweb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (indieweb.org)
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| I think this is a pretty pragmatic approach to decentralization
| on the web since it's achievable now. I like it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| When Twitter first came out I thought it would be an RSS for the
| masses. I thought 140 characters is useless for conversation, but
| a reasonable length for a title and link.
|
| Definitely got that prediction wrong.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Pre-algorithm Facebook was quite good for getting a snapshot of
| what people did gossip about.
|
| However Zuckerberg could not allow his lusers to rank content,
| so they added som opaque algorithm to serve whatever they
| wanted us to see instead.
|
| I have not used Twitter to any extent, but have they done
| something similar?
| Oddskar wrote:
| No you weren't wrong. It's still largely useless for
| _conversation_. It 's great for bandwagoning, trolling, angry
| mobs etc.
|
| We didn't make the message less noisy to fit into 140 chars, we
| just removed most of the substance to make it fit.
| drodil wrote:
| POSSE is also Finnish TV show with the Dudesons hosting it :D
| controlledchaos wrote:
| It's also a software product by a company named Computronix.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic
| about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate
| to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-
| permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public
| content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff
| PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site
| (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...)
| because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed
| and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations
| (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...)
| to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site
| (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-
| styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get
| titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-
| ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works
| pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon
| (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt
| (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site
| (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking
| about stuff with these approaches you can always find a
| convenient way to duct tape things together.
| jawns wrote:
| What are some of the services that are trying to make this
| process as automated and user-friendly as possible, ideally for
| people who have no idea how to host or manage their own web site?
|
| I'm thinking about the people who have no idea how to register a
| domain name, find hosting, etc. let alone federate their content
| to various social media services, so instead they use FB /
| Twitter / etc. as a substitute.
|
| What (paid, non-ad-supported) services offer POSSE but take care
| of everything for you?
| politician wrote:
| You could probably leverage Buffer for this. They mostly target
| scheduled social media posts.
|
| buffer.com
| PersonalOps wrote:
| Yes and no. Buffer and Hootsuite are 2 players in this game,
| both allowing to publish or schedule posts based on updates
| to an RSS feed you configure. Most blogging engines
| (WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo) come with RSS feed publishing by
| default.
|
| The tricky part here is the quality of the posts will be bad.
| Each social network has its own social mores and taboos. Some
| examples:
|
| Fediverse you refer to Twitter as "birdsite". Anything
| automated here, unless explicitly called out as a bot
| account, tends to get ignored as low quality.
|
| Facebook does posts in long-form.
|
| Twitter can thread it to be long-form, but each tweet needs
| to stand on its own with contributing to the overall
| narrative. Basic pagination type of splitting sticks out.
|
| LinkedIn... I don't know anyone who posts there that isn't
| trying to artificially puff themselves up in corporate
| culture, promote their product/service, or some combination.
| I'm truly unsure what a "quality" post on there looks like,
| so go wild.
|
| Basically, posting "<post-title> (<link>)" is probably the
| most ubiquitous, low effort ways of cross-posting your
| content but... it's pretty universally understood that it's
| low quality content and not likely to accomplish the
| originally intended syndication.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I think Micro.blog does some of this for Twitter? Or if not, it
| plugs into Bridgy? https://micro.blog/ https://brid.gy/
| pmlnr wrote:
| That wiki behind the link has quite a bit of depth to it,
| including answers to your question, so it's worth searching it.
|
| Anyway:
|
| - for a full service see, for example, https://withknown.com/
|
| - for WordPress plugins:
| https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Plugins#POSSE_Plugins
|
| - one can also use services like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc
| to do this, see https://indieweb.org/2020/West/webmentions-and-
| automation for more
|
| - there's https://brid.gy/about#publishing
|
| ... aand a lot more.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Seconding this: the protocol-ish things to learn about would
| be microformats2 and webmentions, and then Bridgy can POSSE
| from anything that supports those (someone probably has a
| premade WP install by now, lots of folks use static sites but
| they take more tweaking)
| eropple wrote:
| The first thing that comes to mind to me is WPEngine or other
| high-quality hosted Wordpress solution. You can install a
| plugin (from the web console, it's very easy) to post to social
| media, and there's another plugin to cross-post to Medium if
| that's your bag.
|
| EDIT: I was wrong about Medium. They sunset that a couple years
| ago. You can use their import tool explicitly, or manually copy
| your post in and set a canonical link to your blog. That
| _sucks_.
| randomperson_24 wrote:
| I think the problem is that social media platforms, especially
| Twitter downranks your post if it has a link.
|
| Therefore, recently people have been writing threads with a link
| to post at end of thread. The reason simply is that platforms
| want people to remain on the platform for longer periods of time.
|
| Instagram doesn't even allow you to have a link in your post.
| Just in the profile.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> I think the problem is that social media platforms,
| especially Twitter downranks your post if it has a link.
|
| Huh - is this true? It anecdotally felt very true to me when
| posting content - is there data/reports on this somewhere to
| view?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The problem is that it's very hard to distinguish between
| "posts with links get less engagement because Twitter is
| subtly suppressing them" and "posts with links get less
| engagement because people are just less likely to click
| 'like' and 'retweet' on them."
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You're right, and I think it's a testament to how effective
| POSSE is. The dinosaur platforms are scared of it, which is why
| they are discouraging links.
|
| You described the solution yourself. You can still do POSSE,
| but instead of a link you can write something like, "link to
| original post is in the comments" or "originally published on
| my website, you know how to find it".
|
| It may be tricky or even impossible to automate, but isn't that
| how you know it's good, according to PG? :)
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > originally published on my website, you know how to find it
|
| I don't think that works. People are already lazy to click a
| link, imagine having to go to the blog and then search for
| the actual post
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| To put a different spin on that point: it would be perverse
| to deliberately throw out the cornerstones of the web: URLs
| and hyperlinks.
|
| (Not that I have a better answer to Twitter's isolationist
| shenanigans, mind.)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The scenario I imagine is that they already read the post
| on the other platform, so the reason they're going to the
| website is to find the latest and greatest, which appears
| on the other platforms with a delay, creating an incentive
| to go to the source.
|
| Of course, this also requires content engaging enough to
| create that reaction...
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| You are far more optimistic about this than me. The web has
| centralized rapidly and no platform is incentivized to allow
| links out.
|
| Without legislation, these platforms can build walls easier
| than we can build ladders. Your average user isn't all that
| interested in following links in the first place, so it's an
| uphill battle from every angle.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You're right, I do believe in optimism.
|
| Though it's hard for me to imagine legislation helping the
| situation, since regulations are usually written for/by the
| big incumbents to dig a deeper moat around themselves.
| lrem wrote:
| So, walled gardens are now the dinosaurs and reinvention of
| good old planet is the new thing they're afraid of :)
| kingcharles wrote:
| Same problem with TikTok. You have to tell your viewers to
| check your profile and then you have a single link to your home
| page, and they will have to go there and dig around for
| whatever information you want them to see. Not ideal, but I
| still want to drive everyone to a domain I own rather than have
| them live on a platform I don't.
|
| Pinterest banned my account the other day by mistake and it
| took me two weeks of pestering the shit out of them for them to
| admit it and reinstate it.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| That's why services like LinkTree got really popular. You
| could do the same with your own website pretty easily.
| echelon wrote:
| That _screams_ antitrust.
|
| We need to tell our legislators to go after companies that
| disallow or downrank external links.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Not sure about that. Because they tell you the timeline is
| ordered by what they think you could like - unless you change
| it back to 'home' - so they can just show data that tells
| legislators that people don't click on links, and that they
| interact more with threads instead.
| mooreds wrote:
| A bit old (mentions tumblr) but always a good idea to own your
| content.
|
| It's the perennial tradeoff: do you want reach or ownership. Of
| course, you want both, but getting reach from your own site takes
| effort, time or money (or all three). Platforms like Twitter,
| etc, allow you to leverage their reach, but then take ownership
| of the content (at least the form of content you put on their
| site, which may include excerpts or links or user click data).
| KarlKemp wrote:
| They don't "take ownership". For one thing, it isn't entirely
| clear what the term is supposed to entail. It probably refers
| to that perennial complaint about TOS at such sites, that tend
| to go a bit overboard and are then misunderstood/represented as
| some nefarious ploy to make sweet bank with people's memes
| when, in what some describe as 'reality', they do need some
| sort of license to show the photo you uploaded.
|
| I recently deleted some things on medium that I wrote years ago
| and had zero trouble doing it. Try that in some arrangement
| where you really grant 'ownership'. "Hello Microsoft, would you
| please remove the background animation from the BSOD".
|
| What is really more of a technical detail, the domain name of
| the site serving some content, seems to take on outsized
| importance for some people. As far as I can tell, this are not
| actual creators of content of the sort where it would start
| being lucrative to swindle them out of ownership.
|
| Case in point: AMP. If Google had, from the beginning, made it
| possible for AMP content to be served from the publisher's
| (sub)domain, opposition on HN would have likely been half as
| fierce, or less. As we now know with some certainty, AMP really
| was a ploy to screw over the competition. It's quite excellent
| that it failed, but it did so mostly due to people falsely
| believing _they_ are getting screwed over due to this
| implementation detail, when really it was competing ad networks
| who were getting the wrong end of the stick, but wouldn't have
| been in any position to stop it except anti-trust litigation.
| epeus wrote:
| It's not so much that they take ownership, more that they
| choose who can see it, and can remove it arbitrarily from the
| web.
| mattl wrote:
| People still use tumblr.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| People still use Myspace...
| unicornporn wrote:
| Nah, https://spacehey.com/
| mattl wrote:
| People still use and pay for Flickr
| tata71 wrote:
| What's wrong with any of this?
|
| Like they can't add IPFS or dapp code to any of these?
| mattl wrote:
| They could, but none of this is about that.
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(page generated 2021-11-07 23:00 UTC)