Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments)
POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments)
POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments)
Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)
To me, it feels like Star Wars' rebellion, in a struggle against the big tech (big data, big relationship, big dopamine) empire.
POSSE? This is the way.
But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.
Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.
If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout
There are quite a few useful linkbacks:
- The social urls (bluesky, mastodon, twitter, linkedin, hn, lobsters etc) are just in my Yaml frontmatter as a key
- Then there's standard.site which is an ATProto registration that gets an article into that ecosystem https://standard-search.octet-stream.net
- And for longer articles I get a DOI from https://rogue-scholar.org (the above URL is also https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46) which gets it a bit more metadata.
On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
If you have a Mastodon account, you can embed all responses to your Mastodon post into your site. See https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...
It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort.
It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.
That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE
Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
Whenever I saw an "in the comments" I immediately lose respect for the write because I assume it's nothing more than engagement bait
What makes it difficult is all of the quirks you have to account for. For the most trivial example, Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, but it's 300 on Bluesky, 500 on Threads, and on Mastodon it is whatever your instance wants it to be.
For another quirk, I have like a side-project in which I publish snippets of DJs playing copyrighted music, and while I can post those videos on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube without worrying about copyright, I am like 99% confident my website would be instantly delisted from all the search engines if I used the POSSE strategy for that use case.
I agree with your second point that getting anything useful out of it (as in traffic to the source) is pretty much impossible. On Instagram you can only do that via stories, but you can't automate it, because you need Instagram's story editor to add a link to the story. On TikTok you can't even put a link-in-bio until you reach a 1000 followers. On Twitter you might as well not bother, as the medium itself prefers completely unsourced claims. As for Facebook, I honestly don't even know why anyone would bother with Facebook these days, it's completely irrelevant.
They want you to engage with their user base and not just dump links. They also prefer if users stay on the platform, but recent research shows that the deprioritization is partly a myth; people actually engage less with external links.
And I’m not sure it’s about traffic rather than about, well, being active in multiple different communities. You cross-post where you don’t mind participating, and ignore the rest.
It seems like the culture and audience of each social media service is fairly unique. Is crossposting worth while for you?
While every type of discussion does happen everywhere to some degree, the type of discussion on each service feels somewhat modal. Blasting everything, everywhere could be a little spammy.
To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother.
On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.
1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS
2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc).
3. I can go to those places to talk about it.
Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.
Finding external conversations about posts obviously is a bit more complicated but also if I actually care to see if discussion ever happened, I do so by searching the url. Something that linking via permashortlinks impairs.
I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.
This is an interesting view point and I agree and disagree. I imagine people are split. There are clearly people who put stuff on the web and want to get it into all eyeballs whether those eyeballs want it or not. I see the logic and appeal behind that: if you really believe in what you're writing, why wouldn't you want everyone to have a read? If you don't want everyone to read what you're writing, why put it on the Web of all places?
In reality though, the older I get, the more fear I have about posting online, especially on a personal website, through fear of being rude, or imposing, or coming across like some sort of narcissistic influencer. It feels like a sign of self awareness and maturity to believe that not everyone wants to read what you have to say.
I write in public so that there’s a time stamped publicly accessible record of my opinion that I can reference quickly for people I’m communicating with. It’s like a public ledger
I don’t really care how many people read my writing because it’s illegible to 99.999% of people. Not everything is for everyone. Just because I publish doesn’t mean I want everyone to read my stuff
What you can and can’t do with your own content is also limited and managed by someone else. The entire premise that you can move your posts history etc, while technically true, is not compatible with the web (e.g. support for things like redirects, canonical urls being handled currently etc is again all outside of your control and a not a goal of Bluesky).
ATProto is in many ways like the custom HTML extensions Microsoft had in Internet Explorer to “make better user experience”.
For me one of the main points of POSSE is resilience. If the VCs behind Bluesky got tired of it tomorrow, all that would die is some links to your website. Your posts and content, RSS subscribers, people who linked or bookmarked your website etc - remain unaffected.
With the IndieWeb version of POSSE, the source of truth is the webpage you control.
For the ATProto version of POSSE, the source of truth is the record in your PDS. That record is interesting because it is both content-addressed and signed with your private key.
Where ever that record is syndicated, the reader (or app displaying the content) should be able to demonstrably verify the authenticity of the record.
And you can host your own PDS entirely independent of Bluesky, there are several interfaces for both reading and publishing Standard.site records:
* Leaflet (https://leaflet.pub/ )
* pckt (https://pckt.blog/ )
* Wordpress (https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-atproto )
It's also not that hard to write your own display interface for just your data if you want.
I feel the philosophy of posting on the web and hosting your own website is that the web is the community with which I want to share my thoughts. If I just wanted to share my thoughts with just one platform/community, I would go and just post it on that one platform, I wouldn't go to the trouble of running a website.
I get that it's important that there's safe spaces, and some communities should be like that (essentially, private but online) but that view should be the minority and exception for edge cases, rather than the default view of all different websites or platforms.
A social networking site designed around POSSE may be different, where you can subscribed to your blog as a means to post, and the post shows up as the RSS would in a feed reader. This way people don't have to click through to read what was posted, or can at least read what is above the fold. This can be rounded out with comments, one-off posting, and maybe some standard way to write a blog post that references another, for a proper linked/threaded response for more thought out and thoughtful replies than a short comment.
Side note: It's such a bizarre thing that the platform you're on matters at all. Not without reason (they all have a vibe now, that's basically politically informed). But, back then, you were just on whatever blog platform was the easiest. The platform was more or less invisible (or at least ignored).
If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.
I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web.
There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.
The POSSE approach implies scattered discussions, almost by definition; posting a link to your blog post on HN or some other site invites discussion on each of those forums, by design. And yeah, the proliferation of siloed communities, each designed to pull users in and keep them there, poses some meaningful challenges to certain visions for what the web could be.
I definitely agree that links matter, and the idea of POSSE has always resonated. People should have a space of their own to share whatever is of most interest and meaning to them. I really like Derek Sivers' take on this w/ his personal site:
However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque.
That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.
https://indieweb.org/permashortlink does give a few reasons, but they’re bunk. “More reliable in email”? Not meaningfully so. “Quicker to recall / copy due to size”? Not typically a concern. Maybe a nice-to-have, but you can consider adjusting your URL style, then it can be even better. “Less effort to manually enter”? Repeat of the previous point.
And it doesn’t address the problems of the permashortlink. Cost. Diluting across different domains. Having something different to maintain and remember.
Don’t do separate permashortlinks. Just fix your regular links to not be bad.
However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed.
It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g.
1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel)
2. DCS adds domain to those topics
3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed)
You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals.
e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff
Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.
This is just spit balling.
The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).
A social media feed implies 1(n) curated by 1 algorithm hosted on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram
What I was thinking is:
- foo.social
- bar.social (tech curations)
- java.bar.social (sub curated Java list)
All these DCS (domain content servers) would be polled by your own local client
Your client can then aggregate or organise how it shows this feed
e.g. I could have a trending aggregator for situations where a blog post is shown on multiple domains (sort of shows virality)
There's an RSS and JSON feed for each collection and a combined feed as well.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb....
Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
The idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier.
Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.
> Q: Do we need to worry about search engines penalizing apparently duplicate posts?
> A: That's why the POSSE copies SHOULD always link back to the originals. So that search engines can infer that the copies are just copies. Ideally POSSE copies on silos should use rel-canonical to link back to the originals, but even without explicit rel-canonical, the explicit link back to the original is a strong hint that it is an original.
I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc.
Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?
> Recommended stack for this? Wordpress?
I'd move my WP sites, but I'm also too lazy to convert everything over to Astro (one day, I'll tackle this with an agent).
- GitHub pages is a really nice DX. I have one example here: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... with a custom CNAME: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/typescript-is-like-csharp/... - Firebase hosting is generally free and I think the DX is generally good, but you will be charged for large spikes in traffic. I deploy an Astro published blog like this: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/blob/main/build-d...