POSSE - IndieWeb

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POSSE

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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.

▶️ watch Zach’s 1min video intro to POSSE

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.

Why In General

POSSE is considered a robust and preferable syndication model for the following reasons:

Why Link To Your Original

Common POSSE practice is to link from POSSE copies to your original, using a permashortlink. Here are a few reasons why:

How to

How to implement

This section is for web developers implementing POSSE.

In General

In general, when your content posting software posts something, it should also post a copy to the silo destinations of your choice, with an original post link (e.g. permashortlink or permashortcitation) back to your original.

The details of how to do so vary per destination. See the silo-specific sections below.

Once you have posted the copy to the silo, you should:

User Interface

The best user interface (UI) is automatic, dependable, and invisible. If you can implement POSSEing in a way that always does exactly what you want, predictably, then no explicit UI is needed.

Preview

One way to provide more predictability and inspire confidence is to show what will be POSSEd (within the limitations of the destination) as a preview before publishing

(needs screenshot)

Twitter

Main article: Twitter#POSSE_to_Twitter

Twitter is perhaps the most popular POSSE destination and a good place to start.

If you can start posting notes (tweets) to your own site and POSSEing to Twitter, instead of posting directly to Twitter, you have taken a big step towards owning your data.

Details:

See POSSE to Twitter for details on how to POSSE both notes and articles (blog posts) to Twitter.

Facebook

Main article: POSSE to Facebook

There are two options for POSSEing to Facebook currently:

Medium

Main article: Medium

WordPress

Main article: WordPress

Ghost

Main article: Ghost

Plain Text Notes

Some destinations (e.g. SMS or push notifications) may require a pure plain text representation.

Software

Software and libraries to implement POSSE:

Services

Publishing Flows

There's at least two ways to implement a POSSE content posting flow:

Client to site to silo

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

Client to site and silo

Advantages:

Disadvantages:

IndieWeb Examples

The following IndieWebCamp participants' sites support a POSSE architecture. If you have an implementation, add it, make screenshots or a screencast or blog about it and post the details/link here. In date order (earliest first) :

Tantek

Tantek.com as of 2010-01-01[1] (2010-01-26 Twitter syndication started[2] and caught up[3][4]). Tantek Çelik implemented POSSE in Falcon on tantek.com.

Barnaby Walters

Waterpigs.co.uk as of 2012-03-12. Barnaby Walters implemented POSSE over at waterpigs.co.uk

Brennan Novak

brennannovak.com as of 2012-07-01[5][6]. Brennan Novak implemented POSSE on his site brennannovak.com with copies posted to Twitter and Facebook

Aaron Parecki

aaronparecki.com as of 2012-08-19[7][8]. Aaron Parecki implemented POSSE on his site aaronparecki.com with copies posted to Twitter containing permashortlinks back to originals on his own site.

Sandeep Shetty

User:Sandeep.io First post POSSE'd on 2012-11-05. I primarily syndicate to Twitter using a very lo-fi solution of adding silo (Facebook, Twiiter, Google+) provided share links to each post that I can manually click to prefill content, edit and post. I've avoided API integration because of the extensive experience I've had using Facebook API and dealing with it's random changes. "Integration" has high costs sometimes so I keep it as simple as possible.

Ben Werdmuller

werd.io as of 2013-05-31 [9]. Ben Werdmuller implemented POSSE in his idno platform via plugins. New content has an associated Activity Streams object type; POSSE plugins listen for post events associated with those object types and syndicate appropriately.

Shane Becker

Glenn Jones

glennjones.net as of 2014-01-14 Glenn Jones The blog implemented POSSE using a new version of transmat.io system. New content added to transmat is associated with objects types. A POSSE twitter plugins listens for post events syndicating content. At moment only notes are syndicated.

Jeremy Keith

adactio.com as of 2014-05-27 Jeremy Keith has implemented POSSE using his own custom CMS.

Shane Hudson

shanehudson.net as of 2014-09-19 Shane Hudson has implemented POSSE to Twitter for Craft CMS.

Ravi Sagar

http://www.ravisagar.in/blog/implementing-posse-my-site Implementing POSSE on my site as of 2018-02-21.

Ludovic Chabant

ludovic.chabant.com as of 2018-07-30 Ludovic Chabant has implement POSSE to Twitter and Mastodon from PieCrust CMS, using SiloRider

Adam Dawkins

adamdawkins.uk as of 2019-01-16 Adam Dawkins has implemented POSSE using his own custom CMS.

Examples

Shaun Ewing

shaun.net as of 2020-01-16 Shaun Ewing has implemented POSSE using Jekyll, and custom APIs.

capjamesg

capjamesg has been syndicating his notes from his own site to:

This syndication happens automatically whenever James posts a note using his Micropub client or his Microsub feed reader.

Wojtek Powiertowski

behindtheviewfinder.com as of 2026-01-12 has been syndicating his posts from his Ghost blog to:

This syndication happens automatically whenever Wojtek publishes a new posts using his self-hosted posse client.

... add more here ...

... Add a link to your POSSE–enabled site and the date you started syndicating copies of your content out to 3rd party social sharing/publishing services.

Partial POSSE sites

Sites which only POSSE some of their content, and still post directly to the same silo they POSSE to.

Other partial POSSE sites:

Other Approaches

COPE

COPE is short for Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE), which explicitly lacks a first "Publish Once" step, and thus is more about duplicating the content across various destinations.

Without a first "Publish Once" step on a site you "Own", and thus lacking original post permalinks, the COPE strategy fails to actually draw people to any one canonical place to read/view your stuff, and thus all it does is grow (likely) disjoint audiences across other people’s sites.

Articles:

POSE

Main article: POSE

POSE, Publish Once Syndicate Everywhere, was a broader predecessor of POSSE that also included publishing once on one particular silo, and then syndicating out to other silos.

PESOS

Main article: PESOS

A similar but opposite approach is PESOS where content is posted first to 3rd party services and then copied/syndicated into a personal site.

If exact copies of content are posted on both a personal site and 3rd party services, there's no way to tell (short of comparing possibly non-existent sub-second accurate published dates) whether a site is using POSSE or PESOS. Sites can provably support POSSE by including perma(short)links in syndicated copies that link/reference back to published originals.

PESETAS

Main article: PESETAS

PESETAS is like PESOS but copying/syndicating everything to a particular silo (without any involvement of a personal site).

For example, most silos support cross-posting to Twitter, thus you could connect everything to your Twitter account and always (auto-)cross-post there to keep a copy.

E.g. Tumblr has a UI for cross-posting to Twitter. See Webapps StackExchange post for documentation and screenshots of UI.

Tumblr is a better PESETAS destination however, since it is well established, allows for a wider variety of content, and allows more text, and links to URLs directly instead of linkwrapping them like Twitter does.

Brainstorming

CRUD

All of the above, and to date (2013-222), POSSE has solely described syndicating the C reation of content on your site (publishing) to other sites. This model has been quite successful and perhaps may be sufficient.

However, it is worth exploring the potential utility of a full CRUD protocol for POSSE.

Create

Create is the POSSE default. You create content on your site, you POSSE your creates to other sites. All of this is described above, and in silo-specific details on silo pages.

Read

Read as a verb is interesting when applied to POSSE.

At a minimum, it's useful to implement storing links to syndicated copies of your content to provide for the future possibility of reading from downstream POSSE copies.

See:

Actual direct uses of Reading from downstream POSSE copies:

In addition, keeping a u-syndication link to the POSSE copy enables deleting it to perform an Update or a Delete action, as described in the following sections.

Update

If a POSSE destination allows updates/edits, then when you edit your post, you could propagate that update to the downstream POSSE copy as well.

If the destination disallows updates/edits, like Twitter, it is still possible to virtually POSSE updates by deleting the POSSE tweet and reposting, i.e.:

Consider only POSSEing updates to Twitter:

All of these concerns are regarding the experience that you provide to your friends reading your tweets on Twitter, which of course should be the whole (design) reason you're bothering to POSSE to Twitter in the first place.

For details, see silo-specific POSSE sections:

Delete

Deletes seem fairly straightforward to POSSE, especially to services which themselves propagate deletes to clients.

E.g. one can delete a note on Twitter at any point.

Similar to updates, consider:

However, if you really feel like deleting the content from your site and POSSE copies (e.g. on Twitter), go ahead and do so.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for the UI for the deletion of a post to check to see if there's been any activity (replies, favorites, retweets) on the POSSE copy before performing the delete. One possible implementation could involve the UI informing the user of this activity (or lack of it) and reconfirming the delete request on a per-service basis.

IndieWeb Examples

FAQ

Worry about search engines and duplicates

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.

This is also an advantage of POSSE over PESOS. With PESOS - there's no way to tell what's the original and what's the copy - so they do look like duplicates.

POSSE-post-discovery and backlinks

Q: Brid.gy can use posse-post-discovery to find the relationship between a syndicated post and the original when there is not explicit link. Does this mean I should stop adding backlinks to syndicated copies?

A: POSSEing without a backlink is considered a last resort, and has some costs associated with it. See posse-post-discovery#Tradeoffs for more details.

POSSE or Send Webmentions First

In short, POSSE first, then send webmentions.

See: Webmention FAQ: POSSE or Send Webmentions First for details and reasoning.

Background

Publish on your own site, own your URLs, your permalinks, and Syndicate out to other sites. Your text updates to Twitter, your checkins to Foursquare, your photos to Flickr etc.

Related conceptually:

Articles

Articles and blog posts about POSSE, especially implementing it:

[…] this nudges publishers toward an idea that's big in the IndieWeb movement: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (or POSSE for short).

The idea is to own the canonical copy of the content on your own site but then to send that content everywhere you can. Or rather, everywhere you want to reach your readers. Facebook Instant Article? Sure, hook up the RSS feed. Apple News? Send the feed over there, too. AMP? Sure, generate an AMP page. No need to stop there—tap the new Medium API and half a dozen others as well.

Reading is a fragmented experience. Some people will love reading on the Web, some via RSS in their favorite reader, some in Facebook Instant Articles, some via AMP pages on Twitter, some via Lynx in their terminal running on a restored TRS-80 (seriously, it can be done. See below). The beauty of the POSSE approach is that you can reach them all from a single, canonical source.

[…]

For the Web's sake, let's hope Google sticks with AMP long enough to convince publishers that the real future is speeding up their own pages and embracing a POSSE-style approach.

POSSE as methodology for non-web scenarios

POSSE git repositories

As discussed #indieweb it is also possible POSSE your git repositories to git "silos", such as GitHub or GitLab. An easy way of doing this was described by Christian Weiske at [12].

Sessions

See Also

I try not to get locked into anyone else’s walled garden. I … pursue this publishing strategy they call POSSE, post own site syndicate everywhere …

Write on your own blogs, syndicate elsewhere.

Own your content! There's nothing like it." @SaraSoueidan June 23, 2022 * Brainstorm: Tantek Çelik: POSSE advantages are largely distribution (immediately) and discovery (over time). if neither of those two are happening, then it's not worth keeping it around. Date-time-proof-of-posting can be solved by sending your original post (or a POSSE/tweet copy) to the Internet Archive and does not require keeping the POSSE/tweet copy. * https://andy-bell.co.uk/how-im-dealing-with-twitter-in-a-hands-off-manner/ * Why: 2023-07-13 Jeremy Keith: The syndicate

We’ll see how long it lasts. We’ll see how long any of them last. Today’s social media darlings are tomorrow’s Friendster and MySpace.

When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.

This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control

I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed

"Starting day 2 of #btconf with Laura Kalbag and some #indieweb vibes." Laura presenting a text slide on a stage. @flokosiol May 14, 2024

with embedded photo of Laura presenting a text slide on a stage:

Social media etiquette:

Post to your own site first, then mirror those posts to third-party platforms.

— a rephrasing of POSSE. * 2024-09-27 Molly White: POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world * don't POSSE to X, says Richard MacManus https://cybercultural.com/p/web-values/ * Molly White talks POSSE and more at SXSW 2025 2025-03-09 * https://changelog.com/friends/85#t=6099

Footnotes

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