POSSE is in the air

Cryptocurrency critic, technology researcher, and software engineer Molly White recently published this great primer on the “POSSE” philosophy in her “Citation Needed” newsletter:

A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.

POSSE is a pretty bad acronym (standing for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) describing a pretty good approach where you publish your writings, status updates and cute pet photos on your own website before some sort of (preferably automated) system posts a copy to various 3rd party proprietary services (aka “cross-posting”).

The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.

There are many advantages and inconveniences about the POSSE philosophy, and Molly outlines the main ones very well. For what it’s worth, I’m with her when it comes to engaging in conversations originating from the 3rd party services: I don’t “backfeed” replies from Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever into comments on my website, and instead I just check those services every now and then and reply there. Anyway, check out the original article if you’re new to that sort of thing, and share it if you’re not!

I’ve been following the POSSE approach for about 8 years. Like most people, I’ve written my own ad-hoc tools to implement it, and for a bit more than 6 years this tool has been SiloRider, available on Sourcehut (using Mercurial) and Github (using Git).

The interesting thing (to me) about SiloRider is that it works independently of your website. It fetches and parses your blog’s HTML markup, looking for microformat information, which most blogging engines implement, at least partially. SiloRider extracts your latest updates from that, and can cross-post any new ones to a variety of services. It currently supports Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, and Facebook Pages. When I moved away from PieCrust and returned to WordPress, SiloRider kept chugging along.

Of course, SiloRider isn’t super user-friendly: it’s a command-line tool written in Python, and is therefore meant for tech-people. Sure, I have a super barebones WordPress plugin that invokes it after I’ve published an article, but that plugin is so rough I hesitated a bit before making it public just now (as usual, it’s available on Sourcehut and Github). But if someone is motivated enough, it should be feasible to make it user-friendly enough for a vanilla WordPress user.

Anyway, if you want to give POSSE a try, SiloRider might do the job! I may even reply to questions and bug reports…

I’m always impressed by people who treat their online presence as easily discarded stuff. They abandon their Twitter accounts with the same shrug as when they abandoned Yahoo Mail or Live Journal or whatever, leaving all their emails and posts to rot. I suppose that life is too short to care about emails from 2004 or DMs from 2011, but I so often find myself grateful to be able to refer to some of those old archives that I can’t see myself ever discarding anything. Does that make me a digital hoarder?