PoSSE and Facebook

One core idea of the “Indie Web” is “Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” (PoSSE). The idea is that you post content on your own website first and foremost, and then mirror it to social networks such as Facebook. This gives you more control over the original content, keeping it from being hidden behind a walled garden and preventing it from disappearing if you are banned from a site, it shuts down, the algorithms decide you’re not interesting, or it just decides to hide things older than X years.

It’s a good idea, and I think I’ll be implementing it a bit more in my own life. Don’t be surprised if you see more posts showing up and backfilling the site with non-recent publication dates. Most of my activity is on Facebook, but there is a little on Instagram, and even less on Twitter.

The one obvious drawback to publishing things publicly on your own site is that it lacks visibility controls like “friends only”, which is valuable, but not foolproof because anyone can screenshot and forward anything. it does help keep down the number of randos sea-lioning into your conversations.

Since this blog intentionally does not allow comments, there’s little worry about that. There is still a little privacy concern, but as an Extremely Online Person, I don’t care much about privacy and everything is pretty much out there anyway.