This brill is all about syndicating content. I plan to post about the IndieWeb ideas of syndicating and just generally syndicate my stuff here as an example.
Follow me for hints, tips, and syndicated randomness.
Cross posting
Cross-posting is the social media practice of syndicating or placing the same content, possibly slightly modified, on numerous different websites.
For example, an organisation will have a blog post on its own website that it copies to websites of other places with similar objectives or to silos such as LinkedIn where a larger audience may see it. This is essentially POSSE without the name, practised by people who don’t know that they are being a little bit indieweb in doing so. It is often accompanied by an apology, such as “Apologies for cross-posting”. (The apologies are ostensibly meant for people who are following them on multiple platforms and thus seeing the same message multiple times.)
Cross Posting, IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/cross-posting
Dream logging?
You can syndicate your dream logging to OpenMentions by linking this page and sending a WebMention ping. If you don’t use WebMention, you can send a manual ping on the page.
A basic guide to getting your ActivityPub blog federated better
As most WordPress users know, there is a great ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog part of the fediverse. It pairs well with the WebMention plugin to bring in reactions from all over. The trouble is, it can be hard to get noticed. Here are some tips to get over that hump.
Have an account on a large instance and follow yourself
The quickest way to get started is if you, yourself, follow you, your blog. That means that the server instance you are on will poll for content. That gets it into the global feed at least.
The global feed by itself is not all that much help. That’s why the second step is to also boost your best content. This will show it to your fedi-followers. From there, it is down to the quality of your post as to how much further it goes.
You could set up camp in multiple instances but you will face the law of finishing returns. One account is usually fine (if it is active and picks up relevant followers).
The wider the array of instances that users follow you from, the better this tip works.
Use the Friends plugin
The Friends plugin is far from perfect, but it does allow the blog to follow Mastodon accounts (as well as RSS feeds). Friends and ActivityPub cooperate well.
You can use the Friends plugin to follow interesting people. As a general rule, people tend to follow back when followed. Not always. Which is why you should only follow people if you mean it. If you want to see their stuff in your Friends’ feed.
Connect with relays
There are servers out there that exist to connect ActivityPub nodes. There’s a whole list of them on relaylist.com. I don’t know a lot about relays, but I do know there’s a setting in the activityPub plugin for relays to ping.
If you know a bit more, please chime in.
POSSE
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 silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.
Why
Let your friends read your posts, their way. POSSE lets your friends keep using whatever they use to read your stuff (e.g. social media silos like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Neocities, etc.).
Stay in touch with friends now, not some theoretical future. POSSE is about staying in touch with current friends now, rather than the potential of staying in touch with friends in the future.
Friends are more important than federation. By focusing on relationships that matter to people rather than architectural ideals, from a human perspective, POSSE is more important than federation. Additionally, if federated approaches take a POSSE approach first, they will likely get better adoption (everyone wants to stay in touch with their friends), and thereby more rapidly approach that federated future.
POSSE is beyond blogging. It’s a key part of why and how the IndieWeb movement is different from just “everyone blog on their own site”, and also different from “everyone just install and run (YourFavoriteSocialSoftware)” etc. monoculture solutions.
POSSE, IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/POSSE
PESOS
PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It’s a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd party service, then using infrastructure (e.g. feeds, Micropub, webhooks) to create an archive copy on your site.
The opposite (and preferable) approach is POSSE, whereby a user publishes original content to their own site, and then syndicates copies to 3rd party services, preferably with perma(short)links back to the originals on their own site.
PESOS, IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/PESOS