# Gifting a site

A message in a friend group chat earlier made me want to write a response about POSSE. It's an acronym for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate. Meaning you put whatever you share on the Web on a site of your own, and then if you choose to post on social media you can link to it or repeat it whole.

=> https://indieweb.org/POSSE Here's a primer from IndieWeb

(Fittingly, I have ended up writing a post about this rather than a lengthy message in a Meta app.)

My friend's original comment was that there used to be websites regularly posting interesting articles and they are largely gone now. People might want to disagree with that statement, but I'm not going to. I might reframe as saying that it is much harder now for a for-profit site to survive without tailoring itself to suit whatever the dominant corporate platforms direct eyes to.

I used to be really engaged with what was happening with webcomics. Maybe from 2005, for a period of 5 or more years. I was reading a lot of webcomics and listening to multiple podcasts by creators in which, to varying degrees, they talked about the business side of it. I dropped away from it when other things took my attention, but recently I saw a post from creators who I used to follow in that time talking about their goals for 2025. Number one: Survive.

=> https://comiclab.simplecast.com/episodes/predictions-and-goals-for-2025 The "survive" goal in the episode description of a Comic Lab podcast. 

(Another notably goal: "Triple down on Bluesky in the 4-6 years before enshittification")

Back in 2005 the webcomic business was tough. On top of creating good art, most of the people who made a living at it were constantly keeping up with the quirks of how Google ad revenue paid out, the beginnings of social media and how to promote stuff on it, getting new readers, retaining existing readers, dabbling with merchandise, printing books, etc. The people who were posting their work on webcomic sites then, and who are still working in webcomics, have basically had their income streams transformed every few years whenever something new comes along to "disrupt" it - Comixology, Twitter, Instagram, Kickstarter, Patreon, Substack. It must be a constant pain in the ass for people who would rather be making art and putting it a place people can find it.

(I'm aware this is a meandering post and I'm not even sure where it'll end up.)

The Web is truly amazing. The historical precedents that are trotted out - the printing press, the telegraph network, radio, television - all have analogous traits and lessons to teach, but there has never been anything like it before for such reach with decentralised control. It's amazing that someone with relatively few resources can set up a website and put a message out to such a potentially large audience.

The story of the last 20 years has been the corporate push to control that audience's attention and the discoverability of everything online. I'm not assigning a malicious intent here - something that really stuck with me from The Grapes of Wrath was this:

> It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

I don't think that quote absolves the man in the bank either - deal with your shit, man in the bank! I just think we can sometimes attribute more deliberate control to people who are bumbling (potentially incompetently) in the higher echelons of corporations, while uncoordinated momentum is driving a lot of what happens.

Enshittification is real, and the Web is less decentralised than it was. Except that, in another sense, it is exactly as decentralised as it always has been. TikTok gets turned off and on again, Twitter becomes X and gets icky, Bebo shuts down and everyone loses their whiteboard cock drawings, but there are websites that have been online for decades, throughout all of this, getting a handful of visitors a month, or maybe more, or maybe none, and there are people making their first website every day.

The Web is still there, underneath the gateway apps that many have come to think of as the Web.

Maybe the biggest change is that it is harder to make a living as an independent creator, doing things in your own way. I mentioned the many webcomics creators earlier, who were savvy and adaptable and kept finding new ways to make money in a changing landscape. But there were other creators, fewer of them, who put up a janky website and were successful just from being *that good*. What would happen to them now? Maybe they'd put all of their comics on Instagram (I'm following one creator now who doesn't seem to have a website at all) and maybe that'd work out for them, but it is a huge hurdle for them when Instagram gets bought by a vampire or something and everyone has to give a pint a blood a month to use it or whatever.

POSSE (this is so rambling!) is about saying, "Sure, I'll use your shiny app, but on my terms. Every drip of attention you deign to give me, from your disruption faucet, will lead people to my place, should they want to join me there." It's an inversion of control - the platform isn't your interface to the Web, it's just another site among so many you could never explore them all.

Does this address the problem that there used to be a good site doing TV recaps, that then became a site about top ten listicles, that then became A.I. word vomit about what the actors from Sweet Valley High look like now? Not exactly. But is there some extremely-difficult-to-find blog out there, by someone with a similar niche interest to you, that you'd enjoy reading? Almost certainly.

How do you find that extremely-difficult-to-find blog? That might be a post for another day. I think I've rambled enough.

Oh I just scrolled up and realised that the title of this is "Gifting a site" and I didn't say why. For reasons that I won't go into, I am subscribed to a farming email newsletter, and as I opened my mail app to write this post I saw a newsletter with the subject line "Gifting a site to a child". That email refers to a piece of land, but the coincidence of it struck me, so I'll finish with this. 

If you were to "gift" a child a social media account - set them up on Instagram or something - many of the people I know would be concerned about your judgement (at best).

But what if you were to gift them a website? Saying to them something like this:

"Here are some letters and numbers. Complete nonsense! They don't spell anything at all. But put together like this, they make something called a secure shell key. With it you can open up a tiny space that belongs to you. You're the only person who can open that space because you're the only one with the key. If you want, you can write something in that space, and anyone can see it. It is your way to talk to the world."

I think that's better. (Better for adults anyway... I don't know about the kid thing, I was just caught up in a farming newsletter whirlwind there.)

A guess I've kind of committed to writing another post about how to find good stuff online. That's exciting because I'm not sure I know the answer. But maybe I know part of it. I suppose I can tease that by saying that 2024 was my best year for online experiences in quite awhile, so I'll try to work out why that was.
=> ../../../tags/tech.gmi tag: tech
=> ../../../index.gmi home