[HN Gopher] Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
___________________________________________________________________
Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
Author : 47thpresident
Score : 975 points
Date : 2026-01-02 19:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (indieweb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (indieweb.org)
| doodlesdev wrote:
| This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere,
| Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the
| indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for
| federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than
| federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when
| defending their ideals.
|
| [0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
| kgwxd wrote:
| You can have both! POSSE to post multiple places. PESOS to pull
| in anything posted directly in other places, i.e. anything that
| didn't originate from a POSSE post.
| j45 wrote:
| POSSE offers a single source of truth the owner owns, vs PESOS
| which has multiple source of truth not owned by the owner if
| it's an external site.
| performative wrote:
| superficially it makes me very happy that both strategies make
| very cute acronyms
| fuzztester wrote:
| ha ha, nice. my cowboy (western movies) take on that: ride
| with your POSSE to make PESOS. :)
| performative wrote:
| stack that cash with ur bros
| theturtletalks wrote:
| POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be
| used to disrupt every marketplace!
|
| In fact, I'm building open source SaaS for every vertical and
| leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized
| marketplace.
|
| Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is
| people's content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The
| marketplace's cut is ads and selling your data.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| If only HN had been doing this almost since it's inception. Oh
| wait.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| You can tell it's a good idea because Facebook and other "big
| enough to crush instead of cooperate" media sites down-rank you
| for doing it
| simonw wrote:
| I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of
| years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post
| links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I
| remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a
| Substack email every week or so.
|
| I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and
| LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
| echelon wrote:
| If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats,
| RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but
| also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we
| could have built an entirely distributed social media graph
| that worked like email.
|
| But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
|
| There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on
| simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content
| that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols,
| embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the
| current systems and have distributed identity and publishing
| take over.
| alabut wrote:
| I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that
| mattered, then micro.blog and other "Indieweb in a box"
| services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least
| as big as Mastodon.
|
| The truth is that we're social creatures and for social
| products, that means hanging out where other friends are
| already hanging out. It's my personal thesis that no matter
| how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the
| indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it's
| going to be inherently niche.
|
| Which is fine. Small is beautiful.
| jonasced wrote:
| It's fine to be small, but we can still work on lowering
| the bar further and promoting the good parts.
|
| Then, if there is a viable alternative to big social media,
| my thesis is that there might come a day when a critical
| mass has been fed up and finds a viable alternative that's
| still beautiful but no longer small.
| alabut wrote:
| Promoting the good parts is very worthwhile and there's a
| thriving scene. A bunch of interesting people talk over
| zoom and IRL regularly because of events.indieweb.org and
| we just had our 3rd annual weekend camp here in San Diego
| a few weeks ago.
|
| I don't know about the rest of big social media switching
| away, so I'm personally just focused on appreciating the
| community that's been built up already instead of
| evangelizing. Maybe I'm wrong and something open will go
| viral, like the new Loops video app.
| jonasced wrote:
| I agree! Do you know why anonymous pubkey identities with
| reputation graphs didn't stick, or any examples of it being
| used today? In my head that would solve one or two of the
| problems I see with the modern internet.
| jamietanna wrote:
| Have you looked at https://posseparty.com/ as a possible
| option? Supports integrations with those platforms and more,
| and "all" it needs is an Atom feed!
| simonw wrote:
| Ooh I hadn't seen that. I'm still hung up on character limits
| - I want to make sure the summary I include isn't truncated
| with ... and is instead the right length for that particular
| platform.
| searls wrote:
| I created POSSE Party because I had similar concerns.
| Truncation and spacing are highly customizable. You can add
| a posse:post sidecar element containing JSON that formats
| exact presentation for each platform exactly as you want
| it. The built-in truncation can be configured at the
| account level. And how you count characters, naturally,
| differs by platform, which the app handles pretty well.
| tolerance wrote:
| I know it's gotten some push back but to be honest I'm fond of
| the more manual approach that you take on HN.
|
| While I don't follow nor am I necessarily interested in
| everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of
| having something like a local "correspondent" around when you
| do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The
| lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully
| and transparently are not unnoticed.
| simonw wrote:
| I definitely won't be automating submission to places like
| HN.
|
| I figure if you chose to follow me on
| Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn there's no ethical issue at
| all with me automating the process of having my new blog
| entries show up in my feeds there, as opposed to copying-and-
| pasting the links by hand.
| tolerance wrote:
| No, no, perhaps you misunderstood me. I like how you link
| to your own writing in the discussions here. I don't
| suspect you to start automating that.
|
| To tell you the truth I came to this actual submission to
| express my apathy toward the 'POSSE' concept but I saw you
| here and figured that I could somehow voice that feeling
| while simultaneously making mention of a sharing method
| that I do find worthwhile and more personable. And not an
| easy thing to pull off.
|
| How much of your traffic comes from HN as opposed to the
| other platforms?
| simonw wrote:
| According to Plausible in the last 12 months my traffic
| has been 38% "direct/no referrer", 25.5% Google, 12.5%
| Hacker News, 8.3% Twitter.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age
| of AI?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055
|
| _A website to destroy all websites_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Awesome initiative. Will delve into this. It's how the web should
| be.
| vegabook wrote:
| This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the
| internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and
| pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow
| through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover
| handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital
| relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I
| (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this
| evening (and this comment). Small steps.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural
| youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one
| to talk to at all about many things.
|
| Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater
| vegabook wrote:
| You should treasure said rural youth because such lonely
| luxuries are rare, and will be even more so in the future.
| Spoken as a rural youth myself.
| torh wrote:
| I read this as an ownership issue, where Meta owns your content
| as long as you post on Facebook or Instagram, and has nothing
| to do with LLMs.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Meta and all the other AI companies think they own it even
| when it's on your site.
| BeetleB wrote:
| +1 for writing letters. I do it with two people (one lives in
| the same city!)
|
| But it's not an either/or proposition.
|
| Also, keep in mind that POSSE and this site predate LLMs by
| quite a bit.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| LLMs had no impact on how content is organized as far as I can
| tell.
|
| Some people are just using it to post more garbage into the
| platforms they already were using
| xenophonf wrote:
| Someone recommended Posse Party in a now deleted comment, but
| beware its (ambiguous and poorly written, if you ask me)
| noncommercial license:
|
| https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
| dieselgate wrote:
| It's almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!
|
| Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member
| who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they
| usually post on medium I think.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some
| years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
|
| - we trained the community around us to look to our website first
| for the most recent news and information
|
| - we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us
| off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering
| accounts or groups
|
| - we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd
| party platforms in order to access our postings
|
| - but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any
| platforms where large groups of our community members frequently
| engaged
|
| Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation
| and outside of POSSE - we only posted one
| topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that
| would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would
| post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically
| the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For
| example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much
| clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the
| question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better
| community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner
| content management, and just a better experience for everyone
| involved.
| RyanOD wrote:
| "we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd
| party platforms in order to access our postings"
|
| 1000x yes to this! It can be really frustrating when a link
| takes me to FB, TW, IG, etc. - none of which I use.
| foxfired wrote:
| I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog
| post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on
| my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was
| affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk
| of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
|
| I published a write up just this morning:
| https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Hell yeah! Just subscribed.
|
| I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my
| sites for about a decade.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Maybe a dumb question but why?
|
| Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a
| clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i
| couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up
| or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for
| myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives
| might differ
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| It is kind of fun even if it serves no purpose. Like those
| end of year recaps by various services, "oh shit I played
| that much Hades?"
| foxfired wrote:
| There are some actions you can take. For example, when my
| traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search
| engines were trying to access my search page with
| questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a
| spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I
| shared.
| dewey wrote:
| Same reason why people have personal projects and share
| them on GitHub, it's fun to see people using / starring /
| interacting with your project / blog.
| foxfired wrote:
| Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was
| through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run
| your own server or VPS, you already have this information.
| dewey wrote:
| If you want to count every search engine bot, AI crawler,
| vulnerability scanner as users then that works, but these
| days it's basically useless to use these web server logs.
| casualscience wrote:
| These are impressive metrics, are you able to make a living off
| of your 10M views?
|
| I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content,
| mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work
| too, might consider that as well
| foxfired wrote:
| Not even close to making a living! It does pay for my server
| though which costs $15 a month. YouTube gives you much more
| visibility. I'll try to compile the numbers from my single
| Carbon ad placement and the donations I receive from readers.
|
| But I also don't think I have the process in place to do
| Blog, YouTube, Podcast and hold a full time job. Yes the job
| is my source of income.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Good article, learned quite a bit.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers._
|
| I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the
| number of HTTP requests to your web server.
|
| You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your
| post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that
| represent more readers than people who read your posts through
| HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on
| the number of your front page posts.
|
| [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-
| popularity/domain/?d...
| foxfired wrote:
| You are right, my statement may be a bit misleading or
| incomplete. The ~500 readers are not just local rss bots, but
| they include aggregate RSS bots. For example, I see the
| feedly reporting ~200 subscribers, newsreader reporting 50
| subscribers, feedbin, etc. Each of those only have between 1
| to 3 ip addresses. So for each RSS bot, there are an
| arbitrary number of actual users reading. I can't track those
| accurately.
|
| However, users can click on an RSS feed article and read it
| directly on my blog. These have a URL param that tells me
| they are coming from the feed. When an article isn't on HNs
| frontpage, the majority of traffic is coming from those
| feeds.
|
| By the way, thank you for sharing this tool. Very insightful.
| merelysounds wrote:
| > Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server
|
| At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many
| popular social media platforms restrict automated posting.
| Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and
| may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam
| measures.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| Havent been able to figure this out for Instagram - also the
| only social media that is still relevant for me. (thankfully?)
| never got into twitter where it seems to be easy.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| How does Buffer[0] operate then? Even an open-source
| alternative to Buffer, Postiz[1], offers Instagram.
|
| 0. https://buffer.com
|
| 1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app
| stogot wrote:
| Wasn't Buffer something else in the past? Did they pivot?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It's been about scheduling social media posts since at
| least 2012, seems to have grown into a whole content
| management suite.
| merelysounds wrote:
| > How does Buffer operate then?
|
| Buffer documents a number of workflows and limitations in
| their FAQs.
|
| E.g. for a non-professional Instagram account, the user gets
| a notification to manually share a post via the Instagram
| app.
|
| > you can prepare your post in Buffer, receive a notification
| on your mobile device when it's time to post, then tap the
| notification and copy your post over to the social network to
| finish posting.
|
| source: https://support.buffer.com/article/658-using-
| notification-pu...
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Postiz docs show that users can create an app on Facebook
| and use that key and it will auto post.
|
| I guess using POSSE for Instagram forces you to either
| create a personal app on Facebook which is not easy or make
| your Instagram account a business account.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure
| out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is
| really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups
| other than doing it manually. If anyone has tips, especially for
| Insta let me know...
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| I don't do any syndication so my self-published site is simply a
| POS :'(
|
| Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC
| contritbutors:
|
| https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each
| community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You
| need to get value from the network directly without expecting a
| click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the
| network itself
|
| I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel
| from other types of social media + content marketing
| alabut wrote:
| That's a good take and is underrated. It's what has kept me
| from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-
| automated approach instead of doing the "spray and pray"
| approach of blasting everywhere.
|
| Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is
| big too. People that "syndicate" without actually engaging on
| each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to
| a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig
| without talking to anyone there.
| Yokohiii wrote:
| LinkedIn? I think LinkedIn is the only platform that demands a
| specific style that is completely alien to the internet.
| nicbou wrote:
| I can confirm. I post across 5 platforms and each has its own
| regulars and its own vibe. The tone of my posts is slightly
| different on each.
|
| The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages
| about what I am current working on, but the actual finished
| product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not
| result in lost information.
| susam wrote:
| Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your
| website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most
| of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in
| 2025 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became
| moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and
| shared it on HN. [1]
|
| From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not
| completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three
| largest sources of traffic to my website are:
|
| 1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as
| local RSS reader tools.
|
| 2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech
| newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases
| are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or
| quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its
| followers.
|
| 3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and
| similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games
| and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend
| to return to repeatedly.
|
| [1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
| vasco wrote:
| The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client
| crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm
| not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.
| susam wrote:
| > The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS
| client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real
| users.
|
| I have never seen RSS clients or crawlers preload actual HTML
| pages. I've only seen them fetching the XML feed and present
| its contents to the users.
|
| When I talk about visitors arriving at my website from RSS
| feeds, I am not counting requests from feed aggregators or
| readers identified by their 'User-Agent' strings. Those are
| just software tools fetching the XML feed. I'm not talking
| about them. What I am referring to are visits to HTML pages
| on my website where the 'Referer' header indicates that the
| client came from an RSS aggregator service or feed reader.
|
| It is entirely possible that many more people read my posts
| directly in their feed readers without ever visiting my site,
| and I will never be aware of them, as it should be. For the
| subset of readers who do click through from their feed reader
| and land on my website, those visits are recorded in my web
| server logs. My conclusions are based on that data.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| > I have never seen RSS clients or crawlers preload actual
| HTML pages
|
| Some setups like ttrss with the mercury plugin will do that
| to restore full articles to the feed, but its either on-
| demand or manually enabled per feed. Personally I dont run
| it on many other than a few more commercial platforms that
| heavily limit their feed's default contents.
|
| Presumably some the more app based rss readers have such a
| feature, but I wouldnt know for certain.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Same argument can be made about all podcasts.
| ronbenton wrote:
| RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find
| blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually
| writing interesting content rather than just trying to get
| views/advertise. I guess this makes sense--hard to monetize
| views through an RSS reader
| threetonesun wrote:
| It's funny back in the Google Reader days monetizing via RSS
| was quite common. You'd publish the truncated version to RSS
| and force someone to visit the site for the whole version,
| usually just in exchange for ad views. Honestly while it
| wasn't the greatest use of RSS it was better than most paid
| blogs today being ad-wall pop-up pay-gate nightmares of UX.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Based on my own personal usage, it makes total sense that RSS
| feeds still get a surprising number of hits. I have a small
| collection of blogs that I follow and it's much easier to have
| them all loaded up in my RSS reader of choice than it is to
| regularly stop by each blog in my browser, especially for blogs
| that seldomly post (and are easy to forget about).
|
| Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them
| have style normalization for example and native reader apps
| support offline reading.
|
| If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps
| for other types of web content...
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Do you have a recommended iOS RSS feed reader?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| NetNewsWire is great on iOS and OS X. Use the share sheet
| to subscribe to blogs.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| This is what I use. It's on macOS too and amazing on
| both. Super fast, focused, and efficient.
|
| It's by far the best I've tried. Most other macOS readers
| aren't memory managing their webviews properly which
| leads to really bad memory leaks when they're open for
| long periods.
| sehugg wrote:
| iCloud sync is a nice feature too. I use the Mac app
| mostly for adding feeds and the iOS app for reading.
| Anytime I read an interesting web post, I pop its url
| into the app to see if it has a RSS feed.
| reddalo wrote:
| +1 for NetNewsWire. I wish there was a version for Linux.
| Tomte wrote:
| Can also be used as a frontend to FreshRSS.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Same question, but for Android and desktop / laptop too.
| Never used RSS much before, hardly, in fact, I don't know
| why, even though I first knew about it many years ago, but
| after reading this thread, I want to.
| jcgl wrote:
| I like RSS Guard a lot on desktop. It's reasonably
| featureful, while being snappy and having options to slim
| down the interface.
|
| https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
| fuzztester wrote:
| Thanks.
| bnlxbnlx wrote:
| desktop only: https://fraidyc.at/
| fuzztester wrote:
| Thanks.
| walterbell wrote:
| Lire app on iOS does optional RSS caching of full text and
| images for offline reading.
| neilv wrote:
| Now that browser developers did their best to kill RSS/Atom...
|
| Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise
| their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the
| `link` element?
|
| Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom
| visually in the page, too?
|
| (On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom
| feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site
| icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would
| confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get
| their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message
| about the MIME content type.)
| rednafi wrote:
| I removed all the bullshit social media icons and made sure
| that the rss icon is the first thing you notice on the
| landing page[1].
|
| [1]: https://rednafi.com
| neilv wrote:
| For a personal site, I'd probably just do that. (My friends
| are generally savvy and principled enough not to do most
| social media, so no need for me to endorse it by
| syndicating there.)
|
| But for a commercial marketing site that must be on the
| awful social media, I'm wondering about quietly supporting
| RSS/Atom without compromising the experience for the
| masses.
| rednafi wrote:
| Fair. For commercial sites and pretty much anything you
| want more eyeballs on, you need to put them on the social
| media.
| ModernMech wrote:
| With the lack of styling, I'm sorry to say I didn't notice
| the RSS icon at first at all. Adding the typical orange
| background to the icon would fix that.
| rednafi wrote:
| Fair criticism. I'm trying to find a way to present that
| without being obnoxious.
| uhoh-itsmaciek wrote:
| Maybe a rounded border? I agree it's too subtle as is.
|
| Also, your Segal's Law link seems to have an encoding
| issue with the apostrophe.
| rednafi wrote:
| Yeah rounded border seems like a good idea.
|
| Also, weird, seems like I don't see the encoding issue on
| the segal's law.
| rambambram wrote:
| I think you did just fine. The orange can be very
| obnoxious indeed, and just the icon is more than enough
| for people actually looking for it.
|
| PS: I found out I was already subscribed to your feed.
| rednafi wrote:
| Thanks for the sub :)
|
| Yeah, the idea was that since RSS is still considered
| niche by the broader audience, those who are looking for
| it will probably find it just fine.
| data_base wrote:
| I use RSS Style[1] to make the RSS and Atom feeds for my blog
| human readable. It styles the xml feeds and inserts a message
| at the top about the feed being meant for news readers, not
| people. Thus technically making it "safe" for less tech savvy
| people.
|
| [1]: https://www.rss.style/
| neilv wrote:
| What about Google killing XSLT?
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-
| platform/deprecating-x...
| _heimdall wrote:
| Browsers really should have embraced XSLT rather that
| abandoned it. Now we're stuck trying yet again to
| reinvent solutions already handled by REST [1].
|
| [1] https://tonysull.co/articles/mcp-is-the-wrong-answer/
| wwweston wrote:
| XSLT is the solution domain specialists and philosophers.
| Abandoning it is the vote of the market and market
| interests, the wisdom of crowds at work. This is the era
| of scale not expertise, enjoy the fruits.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its more the market makers that made the vote rather than
| the market itself.
| wwweston wrote:
| Effectively no one was using XSLT at any point (certain
| document pipelines or Paul Ford like indie hackers being
| the exceptions that proved the rule). Browsers keep all
| kinds of legacy features, of course, and they could well
| have kept this one, and doing so would've been a decision
| with merit. But they didn't, and the market will ratify
| their decision. Just like effectively no one was using
| XSLT, effectively no one will change their choice of
| browser over its absence.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| Blizzard used to use it for their entire WoW Armory
| website to look people up, They converted off it years
| ago, but for awhile they used XML/XSLT to display the
| entire page
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its hard to judge usage when browsers stopped maintaining
| XSLT with the 1.0 spec. V1.0 was very lacking in features
| and is difficult to use.
|
| Browsers also never added support for some of the most
| fundamental features to support XSLT. Page transitions
| and loading state are particularly rough in XSLT in my
| experience.
| Fileformat wrote:
| RSS.style is my site. I'm currently testing a JavaScript-
| based workaround that should look just like the current
| XSLT version. It will not require the XSLT polyfill
| (which sort-of works, but seems fragile).
|
| One bonus is that it will be easier to customize for
| people that know JavaScript but don't know XSLT (which is
| a lot of people, including me).
|
| You'll still need to add a line to the feed source code.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| > message at the top about the feed being meant for news
| readers
|
| There's no real reason to take this position. A styled XML
| document is just another page.
|
| For example, if you're using a static site generator where
| the front page of your /blog.html shows the most recent N
| posts, and the /blog/feed.xml shows the most recent N
| posts, then...?
| Zak wrote:
| A reason to add that explanation to a styled RSS feed is
| to teach visitors what newsreaders are.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| A message explaining what feeds and feedreaders are would
| suffice for that.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Shout out to Vivaldi, which renders RSS feeds with a nice
| default "card per post" style. Not to mention that it also
| has a feed reader built in as well.
| andai wrote:
| Isn't ironic that browsers do like 10,000 things nowadays,
| but Vivaldi (successor to Opera) is the only one that does
| the handful of things users actually want?
|
| I don't use it myself because my computer is too slow (I
| think they built it in node.js or something). But it makes
| me happy that someone is carrying the torch forward...
| frogulis wrote:
| Is there any reason today to use RSS over Atom? Atom sounds
| like it has all the advantages, except maybe compatibility with
| some old or stubborn clients?
| cromka wrote:
| People still refer to all these as RSS, even if Atom is
| actually in use.
| talideon wrote:
| RSS itself provides no benefits over Atom. In fact, you're
| quite likely to see a bunch of RSS feeds that use elements
| from the Atom namespace.
|
| You should just use Atom.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Also curated list of rss sources
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
| ekianjo wrote:
| How do you measure the traffic coming from the RSS feeds?
| rcarmo wrote:
| You add UTM tags to the links, like everyone else.
| susam wrote:
| I do not deliberately measure traffic. And I certainly never
| put UTM parameters in URLs as a sibling comment mentioned,
| because I find them ugly. My personal website is a passion
| project and I care about its aesthetics, including the
| aesthetics of its URLs, so I would never add something like
| UTM parameters to them.
|
| I only occasionally look at the HTTP 'Referer' header in my
| web server logs and filter them, out of curiosity. That is
| where I find that a large portion of my daily traffic comes
| via RSS feeds. For example, if the 'Referer' header indicates
| that the client landed on my website from, say,
| <https://www.inoreader.com/>, then that is a good indication
| that the client found my new post via the RSS feed shown in
| their feed aggregator account (Inoreader in this example).
|
| Also, if the logs show that a client IP address with the
| 'User-Agent' header set to something like 'Emacs Elfeed
| 3.4.2' fetches my '/feed.xml' and then the same client IP
| address later visits a new post on my website, that is a good
| indication that the client found my new post in their local
| feed reader (Elfeed in this example).
| xenator wrote:
| For incoming traffic you can use ?from=rss or utm. To measure
| traffic to rss itself just parse server logs
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Please also enable CORS[1] for your RSS feed. (If your whole
| site is a static site, then please just enable CORS site-wide.
| This is how GitHub Pages works. There's pretty much no reason
| not to.)
|
| Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-
| based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it
| (without running a proxy).
|
| 1. <https://enable-cors.org/>
| senfiaj wrote:
| You can try https://corsproxy.io/ as a workaround.
| ronbenton wrote:
| I still feel RSS was the pinnacle. Of course it's a personal
| preference, but I much prefer letting people pull my content than
| pushing it onto them.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| It's also a lot less wasteful and more respectful in my
| opinion. Scattering content everywhere in the hope others will
| see it doesn't feel right to me.
| nesk_ wrote:
| Just discovered https://posseparty.com/ to ease your cross-
| posting.
| jamietanna wrote:
| I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me
| a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various
| posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I
| use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my
| own terrible choices
| nicbou wrote:
| This is my approach and I fully recommend it. My personal website
| is my canonical home address on the web. It has outlived a few
| platforms and many rounds of enshittification.
|
| A few caveats:
|
| - You will have different communities on each social network.
| Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users,
| it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of
| choice.
|
| - Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly
| different messaging. This is partly due to the format each
| platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different
| conversations.
|
| - Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine
| participant in each community, even if you just repost the same
| stuff. Automation does not help much there.
|
| - RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control,
| and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly
| want to follow you might never see your updates.
|
| - You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on
| the internet, and it should stay yours
|
| - People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear
| friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.
| starkparker wrote:
| I've found that managing the conversations across venues is way
| harder than publishing to them, and POSSE doesn't address this
| except for one line about backfeeds/"reverse syndication",
| which most mainstream services either don't support or actively
| sabotage. It easily takes more effort to engage across services
| than to post across them.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| How do you fellow HN'ers separate their online with their
| corporate identity and day job?
|
| I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is
| going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even
| use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer
| services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/
| your employer.
|
| Anyone got experience to share in that regard?
|
| Thinking about this famous precedent:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195#27425041
| sailorganymede wrote:
| IDK, your average boss is just a dude who has bills to pay and
| mouths to feed. They don't really care what happens as long as
| you're not doing something stupid, especially visibly and on
| their time.
| decryption wrote:
| My experience is that bosses read my blog, then when they or a
| fellow manager need to hire someone, have reached out to me
| asking me to apply. So it cuts both ways - maybe your shitty
| boss sees you blogging and sharing your experience, but a good
| boss will see that and go "I want this passionate and curious
| person to work for me".
| rectang wrote:
| I only work for small companies that don't have any business
| interest in areas where I want to maintain independent side
| projects.
|
| When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got
| acquired my a major corporation that _did_ have business
| interests which overlapped with my side projects, I refused the
| bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving
| about a year later.
|
| Don't get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your
| employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that
| your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes
| to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Use a pseudonym, don't cross-contaminate
| crashabr wrote:
| The concept seems trivial and widely used by many existing
| bloggers (and the default for most media outlets) so I feel like
| I'm missing something.
| starkparker wrote:
| It's very much not an obvious pattern to people who haven't
| blogged or don't read blogs.
| MichaelWhi wrote:
| I also thought this and didn't get the point. But the link was
| published 2013 and maybe for users not used to personal blogs
| but only social media nowadays it's worth mentioning...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| People spend immense amounts of time writing intricate
| comments and guides on Meta platforms and nowhere else.
|
| They wouldn't even need to host them anywhere, just have the
| same text on a device they own and control.
|
| So fucking much is lost when a FB group just suddenly
| disappears along with all of the time people have spent
| writing on them.
| hoherd wrote:
| One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their
| removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you
| could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The
| entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook
| wall". This essentially let you use any third party that
| supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed.
|
| Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people
| had to create content _within facebook_ instead of outside it.
| This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must
| originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a
| passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the
| creators chose the entire flow.
|
| IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It
| was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to
| say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as
| a result.
| wombatpm wrote:
| The other step down was when you had to pay in order to
| guarantee that your post was seen by all of your followers.
| 0xpgm wrote:
| I guess it happens when engineers stop driving decisions and
| the finance people take over. Won't be too good for the
| company's valuation if people can access the content elsewhere.
|
| I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They
| have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but
| Discord.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Yeah but Zuck has always been a nasty piece of work. He
| wasn't "just young" and "grew up" when he wrote those IMs.
| See: (to list just one) the constant copying of Snapchat
| pmdr wrote:
| He copied Snapchat and then Tiktok -- which have been most
| likely immensely positive for the bottom line.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Speaking personally, Reels are just annoying (not that I
| admire TikTok either, aligned as it probably is with the
| CCP)
|
| Snapchat features are blood money, they also result in
| less people using Snapchat
|
| Nobody says Zuck doesn't earn a lot of money but a lot of
| it is likely fraudulent and he's just not a very good
| person
| fuzztester wrote:
| Last phrase is understatement of the century.
|
| He's a POS, that's also why POSSE is good. ;)
| pmdr wrote:
| Last phrase highlights what investors care about. I
| personally hate reels and tiktok -- they should've
| stopped at stories.
| alex1138 wrote:
| To me it just validates the history of Facebook
|
| Did he/didn't he steal? Dunno, though there's a fair few
| bits of evidence in the various lawsuits (Winklevoss,
| Greenspan)
|
| But if you didn't know about any of that you could make
| some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new
| thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick
| Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)
|
| I was willing to take his side on a few things because
| the political situation is genuinely unclear and the
| public has been misled but then right after he wrote the
| open letter to Jim Jordan about censorship coercion
| (which was a real problem, I want to see more tech
| companies talking about it) he does this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178
|
| It's kind of like he has raw bits of intelligence but
| doesn't quite know how to piece it together and besides
| "his" inventions (even FB) are put together (largely?!)
| by other people
| fuzztester wrote:
| >But if you didn't know about any of that you could make
| some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new
| thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick
| Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)
|
| Yeah, that trying to trick Indians into that thing (IIRC,
| it was also called Free Basics or something like, to
| sound attractive, prolly) became a big issue in India at
| the time, I remember, although I didn't delve deep into
| the matter. I think a group of leading Indian freedom
| activists took on FB in the media and petitioned the
| government, and it resulted in the whole scheme
| collapsing.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Sarah Wynn Williams in her book talks about how it was
| her initiative to call it Free Basics because
| internet.org was false advertising
| fuzztester wrote:
| I meant _last phrase_ , not last sentence, which is what
| you seem to have understood, going by your reply.
|
| This is what I was referring to in my earlier comment:
| "he's just not a very good person".
| nicbou wrote:
| To be fair, it benefits a platform's users to reduce
| automated posts in favour of real contributions.
| fuzztester wrote:
| I don't like this engineers vs. finance people / MBA divide
| that I see parroted a lot on HN. And obviously, it's parroted
| by engineers.
|
| Like, all engineers are saints and the other side are all
| sinners. What crap. Get real, guys. There are all kinds of
| multicolored and multidimensional people.
|
| Having been on all 3 or 4 or 5 of these sides :) (dev,
| sysadm, manager, consultant, ...), I have seen that.
|
| Grow up, folks, and enjoy life in all its richness.
|
| .
| clickety_clack wrote:
| It's hard to believe now, but Facebook was a good product for a
| while there.
| pmdr wrote:
| That's why I wonder if, deep down, Zuck realizes the walled
| slop garden he's ultimately created instead of what it looked
| like he'd set out to create 18-20 years ago.
| basilikum wrote:
| Facebook came after FaceSmash, a site for rating the
| attractiveness of women at Harvard who did not consent to
| being put on the site with photos.
|
| He was always like this and never intended to create
| something actually valuable.
| krapp wrote:
| The problem is, despite all of the slop and garbage and
| surveillance and everything, Facebook _is_ still actually
| valuable for many people.
|
| People use it to keep in contact with relatives and
| friends, I follow work groups, my mother took COPD
| therapy through Facebook and chatted with relatives in
| other countries. I think Hacker News has been so
| radicalized against social media and "algorithms" that
| they forget most people's relationship with social media
| is entirely mundane.
| sehugg wrote:
| 2011. This in my memory is the year of the industry-wide vibe
| shift from open APIs to walled gardens/cesspools.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Speaking of industry wide shift, how many companies has FB
| fucked up by proxy?
|
| I refer to the video metrics scandal. How many video autoplay
| and other things has everyone felt obliged to copy because
| Zuckerberg (who seems to care about nobody) made FB into a
| fradulent company?
| bandrami wrote:
| Remember when Facebook was an application development
| platform? And people built businesses on that, and then
| they just kind of stopped allowing that? Good times.
| bjhess wrote:
| EchoFeed is a lovely service to enable this regardless of what
| service you use to publish on your own site (so long as it
| supports RSS/Atom/JSON). I've used it to good effect for my blog
| in the past.
|
| https://echofeed.app/
| ozim wrote:
| Downside is "elsewhere" is going to cut your reach when you post
| a link because they want their users to stay in their estate.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Medium API is mentioned
|
| But this is no longer available.
|
| You have to copy and paste the article into Medium manually
| unfortunately.
| 156890237 wrote:
| kkkjh
| rednafi wrote:
| I've used Twitter to publish my thoughts for years. In the
| beginning, I'd write multiple threads to get my points across.
|
| Then, when Twitter started supporting longer tweets, I started
| publishing essays and it got the job done.
|
| But at the end of each year, it was really hard to trace all my
| posts and write reviews about them. That's exactly what brought
| me to POSSE. I've been maintaining my blog[1] since early 2020
| and it feels really good to know that I own my stuff. Plus, over
| the years, it has opened up so many doors for me.
|
| Too bad many of these walled-garden platforms have now started to
| demote posts if they contain external URLs. I'm battling that by
| posting the links as a comment to the original post, which
| contains a cover photo of the blog.
|
| [1]: https://rednafi.com
| cdrnsf wrote:
| I take this approach with everything I post, though I only
| syndicate to Mastodon. I have an RSS and JSON feed for each of
| the content types (they all have different schema) on my site:
| posts, links, books, movies, concerts, status updates and a
| combined feed. I also maintain an ICS calendar subscription of
| upcoming album releases.
|
| These items, in turn, can be optionally syndicated to Mastodon
| when published. For status updates, I have a field that supports
| Mastodon-specific text (for mentions and so forth).
|
| I also expose an oembed endpoint that returns the appropriate
| data for each content type for platforms that support it.
|
| Everything I _read_ is from RSS feeds I follow via freshRSS.
| Links are saved to linkding and are transformed into TTS
| "podcasts" that are sent to audiobookshelf.
| XCSme wrote:
| Don't most social platforms tank reach if you add a link to your
| post or as a first comment?
| lazarus01 wrote:
| I just started building my own website today with Django. I'm
| doing it because I just enjoy doing it. Most of my work is in
| data and ML infrastructure and it is just killing me. Working on
| the front end has opened my mind to possibility and given me new
| inspiration.
|
| I love hn and was inspired by all the devs who have their own
| site. I was drowning in work, but put the Django architecture
| together on vacation, started putting things together today and
| it's been a blast.
|
| I don't enjoy social media and was thinking to posse
| intrinsically.
|
| I appreciate this post and the authors perspective.
| subdavis wrote:
| What features did you want for your personal site that lead to
| choosing Django (or a backend framework at all) instead of a
| static site generator?
| lazarus01 wrote:
| I just wanted to learn how to create an enterprise grade web
| application. I read a book on Django last year and did a few
| tutorials and enjoyed it. I also deploy infra on gcp and it
| works well there. It cost about $60/month for baseline
| hosting with light traffic/storage. I will probably use it
| for an interface for some of my ml projects. I was also
| looking into dart/flutter a much steeper learning curve for
| me personally.
| susam wrote:
| This is pretty much how I began developing websites too.
| Except it was 2001 instead of 2026. And it was ASP (the
| classic ASP that predates ASP.NET) instead of Python. And I
| had a Windows 98 machine in my dorm room with Personal Web
| Server (PWS) running on it instead of GCP.
|
| It could easily have been a static website, but I happened
| to stumble across PWS, which came bundled with a default
| ASP website. That is how I got started. I replaced the
| default index.asp with my own and began building from
| there. A nice bonus of this approach was that the default
| website included a server-side guestbook application that
| stored comments in an MS Access database. Reading through
| its source code taught me server-side scripting. I used
| that newfound knowledge to write my own server-side
| applications.
|
| Of course, this was a long time ago. That website still
| exists but today most of it is just a collection of static
| HTML files generated by a Common Lisp program I wrote for
| myself. The only parts that are not static are the
| guestbook and comment forms, which are implemented in CL
| using Hunchentoot.
| lazarus01 wrote:
| I remember ASP (application service provider, before
| cloud became synonymous with hosting), you are making me
| nostalgic. Back then I was in sales, I was selling real
| time inventory control, CRM and point of sale systems
| distributed over Citrix Metaframe in a secure datacenter.
| Businesses were just starting to get broadband
| connections. I would have to take customers to the
| datacenter to motivate them to let us host their data.
| Eight years later, google bought the building for $1.8b
| and eventually bought adjacent buildings as well.
| susam wrote:
| We are talking about different ASPs. I am referring to
| Active Server Pages (ASP), the server-side scripting
| language supported by Personal Web Server (PWS) and
| Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows. It is
| similar to PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP) and Java Server
| Pages (JSP) but for the Windows world. I began developing
| websites with ASP. Over the years, I dabbled with CGI,
| PHP, JSP, Python, etc. before settling on Common Lisp as
| my preferred choice for server-side programming.
| lazarus01 wrote:
| Got it! It's amazing how many languages are out there...
| very interesting
| rane wrote:
| $60/mo for a personal website is insane.
| lazarus01 wrote:
| I agree. To be more clear, that $60 is an estimate for a
| small configuration and includes serverless
| infrastructure to process 500,000 requests per month,
| plus storage, including a 20gb sql database and 100gb of
| object storage to serve video and images. More ideal for
| an application. You run the app in a container and only
| get charged for the requests, the sql database is
| persistent, so that cost $20/month and object storage
| with egress is about $10/month.
| ArcHound wrote:
| Let me describe my setup, so that you can compare. I use
| a Contabo VPS for around 5 USD month to host my Wagtail
| (django-based) site. The DB also runs on the same infra
| and since it's SQLite I can back it up externally.
|
| I probably wouldn't be able to handle 0.5M requests, but
| I am nowhere near getting them. If I start approaching
| such numbers I'll consider an upgrade.
|
| Check out Wagtail if you'd like to have even more
| batteries included for your site, it was a delight
| building my site with it:
|
| https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/hello-wagtail/
| lazarus01 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your setup, I will certainly
| examine it and compare a bit later. I know my setup is a
| bit over the top, but it is the easiest to learn, since I
| live in gcp everyday. I certainly don't expect the .5m
| traffic, but that is one of the lower tiers for cloud
| run, serverless execution service. This is just a poc to
| get my fingers dirty with the MVT pattern.
| 1dom wrote:
| SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or
| feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you
| or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a
| server.
|
| If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve
| content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG
| pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.
|
| I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static
| sites, but when you really consider the full stack and
| frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd
| party external services they're having to depend on, they'd
| have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just
| written themselves a custom backend from the start.
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| Very similar to what I'm building with opal editor. The "site" is
| static markdown which lives and is stored in your browser, css,
| images, markdown and html. You can keep it as is with markdown or
| compile to html. From there you can easily push to vercel GitHub
| cloudflare netlify. Cheating the server less bit of it by using
| CORS proxies
|
| https://opaledx.com
|
| https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
|
| MIT and open source no documentation yet. But coming very soon
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| I'd like to have a POSSE setup for video with a landing page, a
| static image and transcript, a download button for very slowly
| downloading the video, metadata and links to instantly-available
| external copies so that I can channel as much of the server costs
| that video entails to the big platforms.
|
| Has anybody written about adapting POSSE for videos?
| fsflover wrote:
| Sounds like using your own PeerTube instance.
| searls wrote:
| POSSE Party (http://posseparty.com) supports syndicating
| YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels, but trying to syndicate
| longer form video just didn't make sense IMO
| est wrote:
| I really wish Bsky/mastodon has something like RSS so I can
| static host them for both publishing and aggregating .
| jjude wrote:
| Doesn't bsky support rss: profile_url/rss ?
|
| For example: This is rss for Simon Willison:
| https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/rss
| est wrote:
| I wish I could host the RSS and the bsky network can accept
| them.
| benwerd wrote:
| I must say, it's delightful to see this on the front page of HN.
|
| A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for
| almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating
| elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11
| years, but you can use just about anything.
|
| What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as
| simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats,
| webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the
| community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will
| become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized
| social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites.
| The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human
| community.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| The concept is sound, but the syndicate part is becoming
| increasingly hostile to maintain. I used to have scripts that
| auto-posted to twitter, facebook and reddit. Over the last two
| years, almost all of those broke due to API paywalls or
| aggressive bot detection.
|
| I've found that "POSSE" is shifting more toward "Publish on Own
| Site, Manually Link Elsewhere."
|
| Paradoxically, ActivityPub (mastodon/fediverse) is the only place
| where true automated syndication is still reliable. I think the
| future of POSSE isn't trying to hack together API keys for walled
| gardens, but treating your personal site as a fedi instance so
| the syndication is native.
| pastel8739 wrote:
| I wish there was a way to plug in Fedi hosting with a static
| site generator, but iirc the protocol currently doesn't allow
| that
| rsolva wrote:
| For basic functionality, it is possible!
| https://paul.kinlan.me/adding-activity-pub-to-your-static-
| si...
| mands wrote:
| I recently found out about https://micro.blog/ which I think is
| in a similar vein (https://micro.blog/about/indieweb), but as a
| hosted service.
| joeross wrote:
| It's the easiest out of the box way to embrace POSSE.
| kazinator wrote:
| Posse what? You can literally publish on your own site and
| syndicate elsewhere using anything whatsoever, including typing
| .html files into /var/www, if that's your thing.
| superkuh wrote:
| Receiving webmentions can be as simple as making a custom log in
| nginx and just having it save all POST to the webmention URL
| endpoint. I love it. And sending can be done with curl or
| whatever you want (ie html forms without JS).
|
| Or, you can use any of the many community projects which handle
| all this backend stuff and provide it as a service.
|
| Either extreme works. I love the indieweb set of protocols for
| this. Other things like ActivityPub require active interaction
| for the cryptographic handshake at a minimum and make simple
| solutions infeasible despite other benefits. Indieweb can be as
| complex or as simple as you want.
| 0xis wrote:
| Uplifting to see indieweb.org on HN!
|
| However, I suffer from a lack of high-quality news sources, no
| matter whether they support RSS. They no longer publish online
| these days. And, realistically, I am not interested in most post
| from people I am interested in. So I just manually poll some
| times a month in my browser.
| askvictor wrote:
| What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks
| recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time
| tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to
| host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-
| googlify my life slowly
| ketzo wrote:
| if you're cool just writing markdown files, I really like Astro
| for self-hosting static content.
| alabut wrote:
| I've been an Astro user for the last two years and I can't
| recommend it. RSS support isn't native, doesn't support
| anything other than plain markdown, and all of the extra
| magic of MDX and their custom .Astro templates is wasted
| without feed syndication.
|
| My big project for sometime this year is to switch to
| Eleventy.
| pastel8739 wrote:
| Definitely recommend any Static Site Generator like Jekyll,
| Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, rolling your own, etc. it's easy to
| deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services and set
| up builds on git pushes.
| nicbou wrote:
| A single-binary static site generator would be my approach now.
| You can trust it to run in a few years.
|
| I wrote my own SSG because I operate a website for a living and
| had specific needs. Prior to that I ran Craft CMS on the
| professional website and Wordpress on the personal one.
|
| The benefit of SSGs is that the technical effort is tied to
| publishing. Once it's online it stays online. You have both the
| human-readable source content and the static site. With
| traditional CMS there is a constant effort required to keep the
| website running. My dockerized Craft website wouldn't start on
| the first few tries after a year offline.
|
| SSGs are fantastic for building long-lasting websites with a
| low maintenance burden.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I know this doesn't answer your question specifically but it
| might help: https://manuelmoreale.com/blog-platforms
| lylo wrote:
| Can I shamelessly self-promote Pagecord? Free plan plus super-
| cheap premium plan with loads of features. Also source
| available so self-hostable (arguably cheaper to let me do it
| for you!). Export in full HTML or static-site friendly Markdown
| so you're not trapped.
|
| https://github.com/lylo/pagecord
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Hugo is my choice, but any static site generator is good
| enough. You can build one yourself in an afternoon if you don't
| need anything fancy.
| moultano wrote:
| A related idea that I'd like to see more people do. If you have
| 10-20 tweets on a subject, plug the holes and turn them into an
| essay on the real internet. My first step in writing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763 was to copy a bunch
| of tweets into a doc.
|
| Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your
| thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to
| graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should
| do it.
| nicbou wrote:
| I started POSSE microblogging. My website has an "etc." section
| for tweet-like posts. It relieved the pressure to create HN-
| worthy posts every time. It also gives me a place to share art
| and links.
| peterspath wrote:
| Add yourself to so called slashpage (https://slashpages.net)
| directories. I discovered a lot of personal blogs over the years
| from those.
|
| Like:
|
| - https://nownownow.com
|
| - https://defaults.rknight.me
|
| - https://aboutideasnow.com
|
| - https://chrisburnell.github.io/interests-directory/
|
| - https://bukmark.club/directory/
|
| - https://uses.tech
|
| I find browsing and discovering fun. So, after years of lurking I
| decided to make my own directory. It is called Top Four
| (https://topfour.net).
|
| A /top4 page is a personal webpage where you can share your
| definitive ranked list of your top 3 favorites and an honorable
| mention. In a specific topic, such as movies, albums, snacks,
| games, or anything else you feel strongly about. Or read the
| announcement: https://peterspath.net/blog/project-top-four/
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Philosophically this is what we need more, but linkedin is
| absolutely tanking engagement for posts that have links.
| pmdr wrote:
| Because it's not benefiting them in any way when users leave
| the website, especially to some 'unsafe/unapproved' website.
| ryu2k2 wrote:
| >syndicate elsewhere
|
| That's almost a job in itself because you have to constantly make
| sure not to get shadowbanned. This is probably only an option for
| people who already use "social media" sites in the first place.
| Putting a link to your site in forum signatures was the way to
| go. Unfortunately, forums are 99% dead.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Why would you get shadow banned? You think the format or
| backlinks would trigger bot detection systems?
| ryu2k2 wrote:
| I made an account on twitter/x specifically to promote my
| site at some point. I was shadowbanned by default and had to
| follow other people, like and share their posts and comment
| on other's post just to get my own posts to show up on
| people's feeds. When I checked again at some later point I
| was shadowbanned again.
|
| When I tried reddit I also noticed that I was shadowbanned by
| default and didn't even bother to do anything about because I
| assumed it would turn out the same way. Like I said you can
| use those sides to get the word out, but only if you're
| actively using them as a user to begin with.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The point of POSSE isn't just to blast every piece of crap
| you do everywhere with an automated system - those should
| be (shadow)banned
|
| Think of it more like oldschool blog replies. Instead of
| replying with a 1000 word twitter message, post your answer
| on your blog and reply with a summary + link to your site
| instead.
|
| But ALL social media sites downrank posts with links,
| that's why the "link in comments" shit is so common... They
| do not want you leaving their algorithmic feed to read
| stuff elsewhere.
| nacozarina wrote:
| reading how indie bloggers want to syndicate to big media that
| consistently crushes their dreams is kinda wild
| lylo wrote:
| This is pertinent. I'll get hundreds of page views a day on a
| blog post and if that's syndicated to X it'll get 55 views,
| never to be seen again despite having 1200 followers.
|
| Focus on publishing your own work. Syndicate if it's
| effortless, otherwise don't worry about it.
|
| Blogging lives! :)
| lylo wrote:
| Great to see this here. I've been using EchoFeed
| (https://echofeed.app) to syndicate articles from my blog to
| social media (it uses RSS as the feed source). I also recently
| learned about POSSEparty (https://posseparty.com) which has more
| options but is self hosted.
|
| RSS most certainly isn't dead either. I run pagecord.com (indie
| blogging app) and the majority of traffic is from a huge variety
| of feed readers.
| ishweta wrote:
| Is it really worked as Broadcast on other Blogs
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Because RSS readers are coming up in comments, if you are using
| one, which one would you recommend? For Linux AND Android?
| notme43 wrote:
| Feeder on Android is my pick. Thunderbird does RSS, and I
| already use it for email, so it's a nice all in one on Linux.
| Both can use OPML files to import/export your feeds.
| talideon wrote:
| I run Miniflux on a Digital Ocean droplet, and Miniflutt on my
| phone.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Self-hosted FreshRSS to grab the content and reading on a
| Proper Browser. NetNewsWire as a mobile reader that connects to
| FreshRSS.
| ishweta wrote:
| is it really working ?
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| A problem I would like to see solved, is how I can post something
| on my site first, but still use BlueSky as a commenting platform.
|
| I guess it could just be done as a multi phase post, as janky as
| that is.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I think webmentions would be the answer there, though I don't
| think Bluesky currently supports it so you'd be looking at
| scraping rather than a push-based model.
| soapdog wrote:
| you can just post a message on bluesky and link it to your blog
| post at the end with some text saying "want to comment? Reply
| to this post."
|
| Personally, I prefer using webmentions. I got them back to my
| site using a combination of services, so if someone talk about
| a post I made in bluesky or mastodon, I usually get a
| webmention back to the post.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Q: While I agree strongly with the philosophy of this article,
| and twice I have set up static site generators for blogs hanging
| underneath my top level personal domain markwatson.com, each time
| I cause I could only blog when sitting at my computer, not when I
| was using an iPad or iPhone (I limit my daily time at a computer
| to just a few writing and coding sprints, otherwise I literally
| put my laptop away - out of sight out of mind).
|
| Does anyone know of any mobile friendly static site generators?
|
| I think I have about 3000 blog articles between Substack and
| Blogspot.
| us-merul wrote:
| You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them
| across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not
| let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them
| anywhere you want.
| paulwetzel wrote:
| If you set up the static site generator as a CI/CD action in
| you favorite git provider, can work with both hosted GitHub,
| GitLab, etc. or self hosted Forgejo [1], you have both version
| control for your blog as well as an automatic way of
| publishing.
|
| Sure, the UX is not that great as with a dedicated interface
| like substack, but building a Hugo site is really just editing
| markdown files anyway, most mobile git enabled editors should
| be able to do that.
|
| [1]: https://home.futuretim.io/posts/hugo_build_and_post/
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Thanks!! I will try that.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| You could use Substack/Blogspot/Mastodon themselves as your
| "static site generator".
|
| POSSE (the concept linked here) is overrepresented in relation
| to revealed preference. PESOS (publish elsewhere, syndicate on
| site) is more compatible with how most people (including nerds)
| actually use the Internet; for all the talk about static site
| generators and "owning" your own "digital garden" >9/10 people
| would fall somewhere on the embarrassing part of the curve from
| the "Blogging vs. Blog Setups" comic.
| <https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/>
|
| If you migrated to a fediverse instance with longer post length
| limits, you could use that to actually blog/post while mobile,
| and meanwhile you have a script on your homepage that "lazily"
| syncs those posts to your static site--
|
| When anyone visits your homepage, they see your site as it was
| when you last built it.
|
| When _you_ visit your own homepage, it automatically fetches
| your social media feed, patches the previous input to the SSG
| with the new content, and then uses the APIs of whatever you
| 're using to host your site for rolling out the new posts.
| als0 wrote:
| Does this have a negative impact on SEO or search results in
| general? I'm clueless about this.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Never stopped doing it. And my resolve strengthened when most
| blogs started doing summary feeds to force people to visit --- I
| kept doing full text feeds as a matter of course, and if it
| wasn't for the Twittergeddon, I would still be automatically
| posting to Twitter (now I do it to Mastodon -
| https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac)
| esafak wrote:
| IndieWeb: a blast from the past!
| uwagar wrote:
| seems like the rate at which everything is going, websites may
| soon be dead.
| sneak wrote:
| What's the ideal tooling for this for videos?
| yunesj wrote:
| I'd prefer to write markdown, publish to my static site, and
| cross-post to social media. I imagine I'd also want to get an
| overview of - or make an ad-hoc post from - one of several
| accounts on one of several platforms.
|
| I came across Posse Party and Postiz, both of which are self-
| hosted. It doesn't seem like either is built for this use case.
|
| Which direction would you go in?
| xtiansimon wrote:
| This parallels the learning paradigm of diving into some topic,
| write a blog post to solidify, practice, demonstrate your
| knowledge, and finally promote via social media. Which parallels
| the origin story of sharing your scientific research. It's The
| Way of knowledge on the internet.
|
| I've noted here before a course from Arlington UT about this on
| Edx "Data, Analytics, and Learning" (2014).
|
| Nice to have another way of describing this pattern of writing
| and publishing, even if it does have a funny name POSSE.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46015121
| https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/19117279/CSC...
| Thorrez wrote:
| Doesn't work with a lot of subreddits though, which ban posting
| links to your own site.
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