Syndicating My Blog
I recently stumbled upon a post by Paul Barker on the Indieweb concepts of syndication and POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), which had me thinking again about content ownership, personal blogging and online communication.
As I mentioned in my last post, blogging and personal website-building only really appeal to niche audiences, namely developers, creative types and those of us who are “very online.” So until the next blogging revolution occurs (don’t hold your breath), syndication comes in handy.
POSSE (I know, I don’t make these acronyms) theoretically gives you the best of both worlds. You get to extend your reach and talk to new people via all that lovely aggregation offered by 3rd party sites. But you still avoid becoming dependent on such sites and retain ownership of all that intellectual matter you’ll undoubtedly put out there. More importantly, perhaps, you put yourself in a position to engage with communities on their terms (and your own). After all, if you’re just trying to share some thoughts and words, there’s no need to be spam-linking all over the place. Just spit them out already.
Social media is the obvious use case here, but it should work equally well with “publishing platforms,” especially those who offer canonical linking as standard. Of course, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. You couldn’t pay me to interact on Twitter at this point. And Substack isn’t filling me with much hope either.
Nonetheless, I’m currently very much interested in how I might implement and automate syndication myself. So instead of trying to drag people to my site, it can serve as a place from where my “content” (I use that term loosely) extends outwards.
Plus, it gives me an excuse to spend some more time tinkering with some things.
Sources & Links:
- POSSE explanation on Indieweb.org
- Zack Leatherman - own your own content on Social Media using the IndieWeb (YouTube video) (Invidious link for the privacy conscious)
- Syndication by Paul Barker
Written by Mike Grindle
Published on 16th April, 2023
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