POSSE: Publish own Site, Syndicate elsewhere

I did not know that there was a wording and a pretty well definition of what my website already is made for:

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) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

indieweb.org

the why

As you may have noticed, all my writings, talks, photos and much more is gathered here on this little website to scroll trough, discover and save-for-later. On the other side not all content is re-distributed (or syndicated) on all social media the same way. For Example Instagram (the nowadays poorly managed Image Sharing by Meta) only gets photos but no Talks or Articles or anything else. Same way around LinkedIn gets short abstracts about my articles and thougts but no photo content except when its about an event i visited. This is meant as “targeted” approach, as the members of each media have different excpectations of what they want and need (and the company behind will push the other or deny it). And from time to time there are little experiments, to test and approve engagement and what content works on different platforms, that do not get on my website.

My websites goal is to keep knowledge, fun stuff about work and projects, rememberable photos but explicit no ads, no slop, no Reels (or whatever comes after). To play and fiddle around on the big “social” media is part of the game, but watch out not to enshittify your own playground like it happened to so many companies.

And now more important then ever before: it is hard to be sanctionized, blocked or similar, when you have control over the medium you publish. Blocked on facebook? Doenst matter, my content is also on e.g. LinkedIn and references to my site. Visitors still come to my site to read after the post got banned as they bookedmarked it or a search engine suggested it.

the How

My website is built simple (in my terms of “simple”) as a AstroJS Framework that renders every page before deploy so everything is static, compressed and served as fast as possible to you, dear reader. Every content, you can find here, is “managed” as a simple markdown file with structured frontmatter and combined with the template file to render to this HTML. If i got a idea for a new article, talk, shot an image to publish, the first thing that happens is i create a new markdown file, in the correct content folder, fill in basic metadata and set the “publish” key to “false”. I iterate it some time after time and when i am happy with the result “publish” is set to “true”, the build triggered on my CI/CD and the new content viewable on the web in public.

Now after i already took quite some time to write up and improve the actual main content, my energy bar was more than often low and i didn’t had the motivation to syndicate it after. Maybe you have noticed some up and downs with my posts, reposts or social media attention span. I wanted to fix that in the most IT-guy-with-no-motivation-way: Automation.

Behind the curtain there run more custom scripts with the build pipeline that do exactly that:

• first create a list of all content and a hash for each item, that way we quickly notice changes (new content or changed content)
• for every new or changed content, my local Bonsai-LLM gets the markdown and the instruction how to format it for certain social media. Do not try to one-shot this. The best way is to have a structure and template for each media and run it one after one.
• The bash script checks the output (json) for validity, gating confused or wrong output (always remember its a stochastical parrot, not a brain-cell sight)
• valid json gets send to my mixpost API, where i then have an overview of new and unpublished content of mine and can organize it simply by setting a date and media to publish to. More than often i refactor and adjust the post before publishing but having the pre-work done helps me a lot.

Positive Side Effect: as i do not interact with the social media accouts directly this way but soley with my self-hosted social-media-mangement tool i do not get into the falsify safety of “scrolling around” or “just checking the news or messages”; it keeps me away from doomscrolling and wasting time while still using the tools for reach.