I've been seeing some posts about publishing stuff on your own website and then sharing links or the full text on other people's platforms. The IndieWeb people call this POSSE. You've probably seen me write about it myself.
- First is Molly White with POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world.
- Next is Mandy Brown with Coming home and A peasant woodland.
- Finally, there's Alan Jacobs with POS, not POSSE.
I'm not going to quote from these posts, but I recommend reading them first. Open them in new tabs or something. It's fine; I'll still be here when you're done.
Oh, you're back? Very well, let's continue.
It's been a couple of weeks since I deleted my most recent Fediverse account at social.lol. It's a well-run and carefully moderated server, so if you need a safe place on the Fediverse this might suit you. I left because the Fediverse is still social media, and the only social media platform I ever found congenial was Google+ between 2011 and 2014.
Molly White can talk about "reclaiming" social media if she likes, but I don't think I can reclaim something that was never mine in the first place. On social media, I am what Nick Carr calls a digital sharecropper (and so are you, Occasional Reader). Posting on social media is unpaid intellectual and emotional labor that — on a corporate-owned platform — benefits the platform's owners because more engagement means more ad revenue. I don't get paid or meaningfully rewarded for my participation.
Posting on the Fediverse is likewise uncompensated, but not yet profitable to others since Mark Zuckerberg is still somewhere between embracing and extending it with Threads. Extinction will come eventually, but first you should expect enshittification. Zuckerberg wasn't content to make Facebook, Instagram, or Threads into shitholes; he will do the same to the Fediverse if permitted. Then again, this is the same Fediverse initially populated by people who couldn't hack it on Twitter back in 2012, so it might not be that great a loss.
Even if corporations weren't making tentative efforts at colonizing and gentrifying the Fediverse, it's still not a good place for me. It's not a virtual town square to me. Nor does it feel like a community to me; or, if communities exist online, they are generally not the sort I care to join. Every time I post, I'm just contributing to seems to me a cacophony.
I don't see the point in maintaining a presence on third-party platforms
, because I don't enjoy any of them.
I've only tried the Fediverse because it feels like the social media equivalent of methadone; an alternative to worse platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and Reddit.
Furthermore, being on this social network or that one feels like a waste of time and energy to me; both could be better spent on my own website. The Web is all the social network I need. If I have friends at all — a debatable proposition — they can be reached by email. No social media platform or app can hold my social life hostage.
Perhaps, if I were still trying to sell my fiction, I might hold my nose and make more of an effort to tolerate social media and cultivate a presence. However, that only worked for me on Google+, and I can't be bothered to try to recreate that magic with today's platforms.
Nevertheless, I could continue to syndicate to Mastodon if I still wanted to. As a Michael W. Lucas observed a couple of weeks ago, it's easy to build a Mastodon bot if you have some basic Unix skills.
Right now, I can't be arsed to do so. I once wrote that integration with platforms isn't my problem as a webmaster, since I provide RSS feeds. I have come to think that POSSE isn't really about syndication, but about discoverability. However, POSSE isn't the answer to discoverability on the web. You want people to find websites? Build your own website, and then link to other people's websites. Get linked on other people's websites.
ONLY TRUST YOUR LINKS. PLATFORMS WILL NEVER HELP YOU.
Even if I'm wrong about POSSE being a way to use platforms to make your website "discoverable" to random people, I'm still unwilling to keep doing it. I've come around to Alan Jacobs' viewpoint. I want to remember how to be content to do my own thing, and not worry about having — let alone growing — an audience.
For some reason I remember a poster I had seen on a classroom wall in my childhood listing the steps a writer must follow. The last step was "sharing". The idea, as I recall, was that if nobody else is reading what you've written, then you might as well have not written at all. At least, that was what the teacher had told me. I had gotten sent to the principal for suggesting that she hire a competent necromancer so she could try selling that bullshit to Emily Dickinson, since most of her work went unpublished until after her death.
The look on the teacher's face alone was worth it.
I'm rather less reticent about sharing my writing as a man than I had been as a boy, more's the pity for the rest of you. I'm content to do my sharing on my own website, and limit my syndication to forums I frequent when they encourage members to share blog posts. However, if you want to share something I've written on your own website, you're welcome to do so as long as you give credit and aren't trying to make money off of me. If you want to make a bot that shares links from my RSS feed, that's also fine, though please cache the feed for 24 hours instead of having the bot get the feed every time it posts.
I figure that if people want to read what I'm writing that badly, or see more people read it, they'll find a way to make that happen without my help. If not, that's fine, too. I'll still be here, doing my own thing.
There are also links below every post where you can mail posts to your friends or share them on your parasocial media accounts using ShareOpenly service by Ben Werdmuller, though I'm tempted to remove that because I've never heard of anybody using it. Besides, Werdmuller might be OK with supporting Threads and Bluesky, but I need not belabor my opinion of corporate-owned social media.
I think I've come to the conclusion that the only posse I want is the sort André the Giant was reputed to have had. If you want to join my posse, just tell your friends about me. Hell, if you want to annoy your enemies, you can tell them about me, too.