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When you publish on your #IndieWeb site, you can decide afterwards where to distribute your content, and when. Figure out how you want to fit into the network of sites & instances.
We call this POSSE — for Publish on your Own Site, then Syndicate Elsewhere.^1
By prioritizing your own site, you decide whether (and when) you want to syndicate your posts (or a particular post) to a feed, to a fediverse, to a social media silo or silos, and/or to email like a newsletter.
You can make it as simple or as detailed as you want. It’s up to you.
Choose deliberately. Change your mind when things change.
You can opt out of any destination, either by not opting-in, i.e. explicitly not sending your posts to them, or blocking them if necessary.
Here are a few of the destination decisions I’ve made, and reasons why.
You can delay sending a post to an RSS or Atom feed, say 10 minutes after the time of publication, to give yourself a chance to edit your post, fix typos or links, before a classic feed reader retrieves and perhaps caches your post.
You can further delay sending to known uneditable destinations, like Twitter or email, to give yourself even longer to make further edits, corrections, updates, or improvements based on feedback to your original post.
Some destination decisions may depend on the type of post.
When you post a reply to someone else’s post, in addition to sending a webmention to that other post, it makes sense to also distribute it to where that other post was originally distributed, or a subset thereof, threading your POSSE reply with their original post POSSE copy.
https://indieweb.org/reply#POSSE_a_reply
For example, if you reply to someone’s IndieWeb note, and they’ve POSSEd that note to Twitter, you should POSSE your reply to Twitter as well, threading it with their POSSE copy, if you’re still using Twitter that is. If they did not POSSE their original note to Twitter, there may be reasons to POSSE your reply to Twitter anyway, if your reply makes sense there on its own.
https://indieweb.org/Twitter#POSSE_Replies_to_Twitter
Some destinations have content limitations^2, and you may want to take that into consideration when authoring your content, or not.
For example, you may want to more carefully copy-edit the first 256 (for now) characters of a note if you plan to POSSE to Twitter, so that the content that makes it through makes sense as an introduction, or a summary, or a hook, and perhaps has discovery features like hashtags.
https://indieweb.org/Twitter#POSSE_Notes_to_Twitter
You can use that POSSE tweet text length limitation strategically, placing content after that 256 character cut-off that you may want to edit or expand in an update, or content Twitter may mess-up, like @-domain mentions I described yesterday (day 14).
When you publish a multiphoto^3 post, if you’re POSSEing to Twitter, you may want to re-order your photos to choose which four photos show up in your POSSE tweet, e.g. if you happen to be using Bridgy Publish to cross-post your photos to Twitter. You can always re-order your original multiphoto post after POSSEing it.
If you’re POSSEing photos to Instagram, since you can only do that manually, there’s no need to edit your original to fit Instagram’s 10-photo limitation, or 2200 characters caption limit, or 30 hashtags limit, or 20 person-tags limit.
https://indieweb.org/multi-photo#How_to_POSSE
Or you can reconsider what if anything you get from syndicating to Twitter or Instagram.
Are people still seeing and interacting with your posts there? Are your friends?
If & when social media algorithms deprioritize your original posts in favor of showing more ads, you can deprioritize posting to social media.
If & when your friends quit social media silos^4, you can quit posting copies of your posts to those social media silos.
You decide what content goes where, when, why, and can change your decisions any time you want.
POSSEing to social media was always a stopgap.
As social media silos self-destruct, you can stop syndicating to them.
Thanks to Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) for the banner image.
This is day 15 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.
← Day 14: https://tantek.com/2023/014/t4/domain-first-federated-atmention
→ 🔮
^1 https://indieweb.org/POSSE
^2 Day 5: https://tantek.com/2023/005/t3/indieweb-simpler-approach
^3 https://indieweb.org/multi-photo
^4 https://indieweb.org/silo-quits