Publish (On Your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

Summary

POSSE icon POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. ▶️ watch Zach’s 1min* video intro to POSSE Why Let your friends read your posts, their way. POSSE lets your friends keep using whatever they use to read your stuff (e.g. social media silos like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Neocities, etc.). Stay in touch with friends now, not some theoretical future. POSSE is about staying in touch with current friends now, rather than the potential of staying in touch with friends in the future. Friends are more important than federation. By focusing on relationships that matter to people rather than architectural ideals, from a human perspective, POSSE is more important than federation. Additionally, if federated approaches take a POSSE approach first, they will likely get better adoption (everyone wants to stay in touch with their friends), and thereby more rapidly approach that federated future. POSSE is beyond blogging. It's a key part of why and how the IndieWeb movement is different from just "everyone blog on their own site", and also different from "everyone just install and run (YourFavoriteSocialSoftware)" etc. monoculture solutions. Why In General POSSE is considered a robust and preferable syndication model for the following reasons: Reduce 3rd party dependence. By posting directly to your own site, you're not dependent on 3rd Party services to do so -- if you can access your site, you can publish your content. On the contrary with PESOS, when the 3rd party site is down, you are unable to add content. Ownership. By posting first on your own site, you create a direct ownership chain that can be traced back to you without any intervening 3rd party services (silos) TOS's getting in the way (which is a vulner...