Discussion
POSSE
nclin_: 6 minutes 4 points top of front page. Is this how the algorithm works, or is this being promoted?
Brajeshwar: Well, this pops up pretty often and we all like it. I think about 10 years or so.
kleiba: Nice that we have a name now for something that's pretty much standard and common practice. Not that we necessarily needed a name, but it's still nice to have one.
snowhy: Agreed, and good to know other people also doing similar processes
xnorswap: 4 points in 6 minutes is pretty good for HN, so yeah I'd guess that's how the algorithm works.
kitd: > nowThe idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier.Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.
tomaytotomato: I've always liked this idea.However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed.It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g.1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel)2. DCS adds domain to those topics3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed)You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals.e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuffMeanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.This is just spit balling.
azangru: > something that's pretty much standard and common practiceIs it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
matsemann: I like when I read something, and it has links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. Most blogs don't have a very active comment field, and if I'm reading it a few days late, it's nice to still be able to find other's thoughts on the matter.
nicbou: I follow this approach. It's mostly because I want to own the land I build on.It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort.It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.
kleiba: The idea is not that you necessarily write a Twitter-length post on your website - you can write a full blog post, but then post links back to that post on social media.
janalsncm: A cool feature for the small web would be:1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc).3. I can go to those places to talk about it.Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.
Pooge: Didn't you just describe a social media feed?The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).
maelito: Strange to not see the "atproto" term on that page.
theshrike79: [delayed]
theshrike79: [delayed]
gucci-on-fleek: Not that strange, the site is from 2016 [0], while ATproto is from 2022 [1].[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb....[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol
rednafi: I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums.But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.[1]: https://rednafi.com
alemwjsl: Nice blog, thanks for this one: https://rednafi.com/go/splintered-failure-modes/. Well written - I only need to read that once and now remembered it.
ui301: RSS is a refreshingly simple way (and thus, trustworthy) of taking back control over what we see in a world of algorithmic "curation" (i.e. mixing in ads and manipulation, and taking away things that would interest us).
OuterVale: I follow the opposite with PESOS: Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. Work really nicely as I've got some automation and systems in place that allow me to maintain a full firehose of all my posts and notable actions across the web on my own site. Then I can sort through them and reference them (which I do frequently) with ease. I do recommend.
CrociDB: I think it's funny that "POSSE" in Portuguese means "ownership". :)
MrOrelliOReilly: I like the principle, but I also find that we software folk commonly mistake the creation of a website as the goal, rather than the production of "content" (e.g. blog posts). I spent years trying to publish a blog and continually getting derailed building the ultimate static website. Recently I switched to a Substack hosted on my own subdomain, and now I'm finally writing. At least I still own the subdomain.
input_sh: I don't agree with your first point at all, posting on other platforms is trivial and there's what must be hundreds of post scheduling options you can hook into an RSS feed. Here's a completely open source one that you have to spend a lot of time configuring API keys for, but then it just works: https://postiz.com/What makes it difficult is all of the quirks you have to account for. For the most trivial example, Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, but it's 300 on Bluesky, 500 on Threads, and on Mastodon it is whatever your instance wants it to be.For another quirk, I have like a side-project in which I publish snippets of DJs playing copyrighted music, and while I can post those videos on TikTok/Instagram/YouTube without worrying about copyright, I am like 99% confident my website would be instantly delisted from all the search engines if I used the POSSE strategy for that use case.I agree with your second point that getting anything useful out of it (as in traffic to the source) is pretty much impossible. On Instagram you can only do that via stories, but you can't automate it, because you need Instagram's story editor to add a link to the story. On TikTok you can't even put a link-in-bio until you reach a 1000 followers. On Twitter you might as well not bother, as the medium itself prefers completely unsourced claims. As for Facebook, I honestly don't even know why anyone would bother with Facebook these days, it's completely irrelevant.
cubefox: I wonder whether this actually works:> Q: Do we need to worry about search engines penalizing apparently duplicate posts?> A: That's why the POSSE copies SHOULD always link back to the originals. So that search engines can infer that the copies are just copies. Ideally POSSE copies on silos should use rel-canonical to link back to the originals, but even without explicit rel-canonical, the explicit link back to the original is a strong hint that it is an original.
sdoering: Interesting that the article missed POSSE party by Justin Searls [1] in their tools section.[1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party
Publish on your own site,
tomhow: Previously...Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments)POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments)POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments)Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)
ui301: I like the well-working acronym of its opposite, PESOS - https://indieweb.org/PESOS.To me, it feels like Star Wars' rebellion, in a struggle against the big tech (big data, big relationship, big dopamine) empire.POSSE? This is the way.
