Jeff Triplett, in a post encouraging people to post more:
It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.
This continues to be the ideal; publishing on our own blogs and then, if we desire, share on the vast array of social networks available to us now.
However, this also continues to be extremely hard to do well. I struggle with this as much as anyone. I want to publish more on my blog but it is easier to publish elsewhere. It is also difficult to format syndicated posts across platforms in such a way as they do not feel alien.
You can spot a POSSE’d post a mile away. Mentions of usernames that do not exist on the platform, incomplete sentences cut off by character limits, and just generally poor formatting. Every platform has their own nuanced post formats and it is next to impossible to have a blog post format well across them all. POSSE’d posts are often neglected by their authors if they aren’t active on that platform, leaving discussions to dry up and stop.
While POSSE may be better than nothing it certainly isn’t very good or easy. I applaud those that do it fairly well.
My belly aching about POSSE aside, I agree with Jeff and aspire to do the same. Publish your content on a domain and platform that you own. It seems more important than ever to try to do this.
/via Nick Simson.
Comments
6 responses to “Please publish more (on your website)”
@colin @cdevroe I read your post. you’re saying that it’s harder to post on your own domains and, as someone who has been doing that since 1994, I need to disagree. I think what you’re really trying to say is it’s hard to have what you post on your own domains discovered by others. That’s an entirely different matter.
@mlanger @colin My post isn't about discovery. But you are right, that part is hard. My post is about having each syndicated post on each platform feel as though it belongs on that platform.
@cdevroe @colin I don’t know what you mean by “syndicated post” if it’s your own domain.
@mlanger @colin By syndicate I mean if someone publishes a photo on their own site, but it gets automatically shared to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Pixelfed, etc.
Oh, and I also started publishing on the web in 1994. 🙂
@cdevroe @colin So you’re talking about shared content. I don’t think we have any control over that. I don’t think we ever did.
Or are you talking about setting up plug-ins, etc., to automatically share your content to these platforms? If so, stop the sharing. Or maybe you could set something up that shares to specific platforms based on specific categories? I’m assuming that you’re using some sort of CMS with categories.
I guess I just don’t understand the problem.
@mlanger @colin Don't worry, it could also be that I didn't make my point clearly enough in my blog post! We're overdue for a phone chat sometime soon! 🙂