On POSSE

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It's one of the principles of the IndieWeb. It’s the idea that your content should live on your site, on a domain name you own and you should then distribute that content in as many places as possible. Overall it’s a nice idea but one I never felt compelled to make mine.

My content lives here, on my site. Everything in here is under my control and it’s then distributed through three distribution channels.

The first—and most obvious—is the web itself. My content is distributed to you via the Internet. You can ask your browser to get this page you’re reading right now and get access to my content.

The second is RSS. You can tell your RSS reader to fetch the content available on my website and you can then consume my content inside your app of choice.

The final one is email. I send my posts via email because some people prefer to stay up to date that way and who am I to prevent that from happening?

But these three methods only take care of distribution and distribution of content is only part of the equation. You then have interaction. The point of putting content out there is to connect, to interact with others, to exchange ideas, and to grow. And interactions, in my world, happen via email. 95% of the interactions I have happen via email with the occasional message on iMessage. Both of those communication methods are always monitored because they live on my Mac and my phone.

Now, what if I were to follow the POSSE mantra? I’d probably sign up for a bunch of different services and scatter my content everywhere there are people. But those people might then comment and try to get in touch with me on those platforms. Platforms I’d then have to monitor. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for that. And if I don’t check them, those are lost connections, missed opportunities to interact with other human beings.

That to me is a terrible outcome and it’s why don’t want to distribute my content outside of those three channels. But maybe I’m wrong so if you have a different opinion please reach out.