RE: The syndicate

Jeremy Keith over at adactio.com has the following to say about the new platforms springing up like mushrooms out of my dog’s shit after a thunderstorm:

Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.

Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.

I think this is a good perspective to have, but my opinion might be a little harsher. I’ve got my Friendica account on libranet.de set up to pull posts from my RSS feed and syndicate them.

It will be the last time I ever set up such syndication. It was one thing to do it on a non-commercial federated platform, but to create accounts on Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Threads, Reddit, Medium, Substack, etc?

Hell no.

My posts are all licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 international. That means you can pretty much do what you want with them as long as you…

1. give me credit
2. don’t try to make any money off my work
3. share any work based on my work under the same license

I can’t stop random people from sharing my posts on ad- or subscription-supported platforms like Twitter, Medium, Bluesky, etc. I won’t even know it’s happening unless somebody tells me, and am I supposed to sue every rando who thinks they’re doing me a favor? However, I regard such sharing as commercial use on the part of the platforms and I do not consent to having my work shared on such platforms. Nor will I consent to set up syndication for free.

Exposure ain’t gonna pay my mortage.

Strictly speaking, I can’t stop these platforms from pulling my feed and automatically dumping my posts into people’s feeds if they think it will “boost engagement”. But that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to help.

If Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Huffman, Ev Williams, Manton Reece¹ or whoever runs Schlubstack want my posts on their platforms, then they can damned well come to me and make a deal. Let’s see these clowns offer me money in exchange for a commercial license to syndicate my writing on their platform, as well as consulting fees² for making sure my feed integrates with their platform.

I know this will almost certainly never happen. If these corporations want my writing, they can pretty much just take it. That’s what I get for having a publicly accessible website with a RSS feed. And I doubt the Creative Commons license would stand up in court against one of these billionaire-owned platforms.

At least not unless the class-action suit by authors against OpenAI works in the authors’ favor and creates a generally applicable precedent in US copyright law. But I’m more likely to win the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award for Spiral Architect while also getting a multi-million dollar adaptation and merchandising³ deal.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to cooperate with these platforms or the overprivileged assholes that own them. If my feed doesn’t work on their platform even though it’s a valid feed? That’s not my problem unless they’re paying me to give a shit. I already did my part to be interoperable with silos. I provided a valid XML feed. It’s up to the silos to import it.

If they can’t? Tough shit. Maybe they aren’t hiring the best and brightest programmers after all. No skin off my nose either way; I’ve still got my day job.