This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.
POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.
It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
>the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.
You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.
> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually.
If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...
I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
I can confirm. I post across 5 platforms and each has its own regulars and its own vibe. The tone of my posts is slightly different on each.
The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages about what I am current working on, but the actual finished product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not result in lost information.
Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
Based on my own personal usage, it makes total sense that RSS feeds still get a surprising number of hits. I have a small collection of blogs that I follow and it's much easier to have them all loaded up in my RSS reader of choice than it is to regularly stop by each blog in my browser, especially for blogs that seldomly post (and are easy to forget about).
Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them have style normalization for example and native reader apps support offline reading.
If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps for other types of web content…
Now that browser developers did their best to kill RSS/Atom...
Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the `link` element?
Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom visually in the page, too?
(On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message about the MIME content type.)
Is there any reason today to use RSS over Atom? Atom sounds like it has all the advantages, except maybe compatibility with some old or stubborn clients?
Please also enable CORS[1] for your RSS feed. (If your whole site is a static site, then please just enable CORS site-wide. This is how GitHub Pages works. There's pretty much no reason not to.)
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
It’s also a lot less wasteful and more respectful in my opinion. Scattering content everywhere in the hope others will see it doesn’t feel right to me.
I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices
100 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 98.3 ms ] thread[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055
A website to destroy all websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784
But it's not an either/or proposition.
Also, keep in mind that POSSE and this site predate LLMs by quite a bit.
Some people are just using it to post more garbage into the platforms they already were using
https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.
You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482285
Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:
https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages about what I am current working on, but the actual finished product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not result in lost information.
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them have style normalization for example and native reader apps support offline reading.
If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps for other types of web content…
Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the `link` element?
Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom visually in the page, too?
(On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message about the MIME content type.)
Here's an oldie but a goodie regarding RSS vs Atom [2]
[1]: https://ittavern.com/difference-between-rss-and-atom/
[2]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
1. <https://enable-cors.org/>