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.
On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.
I just use HN as my comment platform. I have a Hugo short code that (very respectfully!) grabs the comments on a full rebuild, but only if those comments are not already cached and if the post is less than 7 days old. The formatting looks quite good on my site. Feel free to check it out at the bottom of this post: https://mketab.org/blog/sqlite_kdbx
> 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.
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.
That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE
Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
Disagree that it’s hard to automate. There are services and tools that make it easy. I use micro.blog which can cross-post to as many or few socials as you want. (I’m not affiliated, just a happy user.)
And I’m not sure it’s about traffic rather than about, well, being active in multiple different communities. You cross-post where you don’t mind participating, and ignore the rest.
It seems like the culture and audience of each social media service is fairly unique. Is crossposting worth while for you?
While every type of discussion does happen everywhere to some degree, the type of discussion on each service feels somewhat modal. Blasting everything, everywhere could be a little spammy.
As someone on the receiving end of POSSE, who is often on the multiple platforms people post to, this approach ends up feeling impersonal and spammy. I totally get the reasoning people have for doing it. But, to me, it's very "ship it" focused, rather than conversation focused. Maybe I'm just getting old.
I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating.
If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.
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.
If I werent more critical, I would have read this as an astroturf by big tech sort of thing. Like "it's inevitable that big tech will win, and so therefore syndicate everywhere or you have lost the game." I dont really get what game we're playing though. Why do I care if my friend who only uses Facebook sees my blog posts? What do I get from that other than the feeling of a maybe-connection (much like their criticism of federated networks - youre hoping for a future where this works out for you.)
I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.
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).
However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque.
That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.
> 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.
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.
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 topics
3. 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 stuff
Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.
I hated this (so far) for any microblog-related things where I tried it. That was mostly many years ago with Twitter.
To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother.
On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.
I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc.
Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?
82 comments
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
> If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles
Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-zarr-v3-layout
There are quite a few useful linkbacks:
- The social urls (bluesky, mastodon, twitter, linkedin, hn, lobsters etc) are just in my Yaml frontmatter as a key
- Then there's standard.site which is an ATProto registration that gets an article into that ecosystem https://standard-search.octet-stream.net
- And for longer articles I get a DOI from https://rogue-scholar.org (the above URL is also https://doi.org/10.59350/tk0er-ycs46) which gets it a bit more metadata.
On my TODO list is aggregating all the above into one static comment thread that I can render. Not sure it's worth the trouble beyond linking to each network as I'm currently doing, since there's rarely any cross-network conversations anyway.
> 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.
If you have a Mastodon account, you can embed all responses to your Mastodon post into your site. See https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comme...
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.
> It works well, but it's hard to automate
That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE
Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
And I’m not sure it’s about traffic rather than about, well, being active in multiple different communities. You cross-post where you don’t mind participating, and ignore the rest.
> the discussion will vary by community
It seems like the culture and audience of each social media service is fairly unique. Is crossposting worth while for you?
While every type of discussion does happen everywhere to some degree, the type of discussion on each service feels somewhat modal. Blasting everything, everywhere could be a little spammy.
1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS
2. 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.
If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.
I dont post on federated networks yet but I would rather share in my principles with those willing to listen than to throw up my hands and share my stuff everywhere.
However, I skip permashortlinks - I try to keep my regular links relevant and short. Also, I like seeing full links, they can often indicate what content awaits there - vs short links, which are more opaque.
That's one more benefit of this workflow: it can be adjusted to fit one's personal preferences. I suppose others might prefer short links or maybe at some point I'll change my mind; with POSSE making these kind of changes is easy.
> 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.
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 topics
3. 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 stuff
Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.
This is just spit balling.
To me this can work when you go all in on web standards and get the replies collected at the source, I guess with the fediverse it's easier but I have mostly accepted the whole thing as ephemeral and just don't bother.
On the other hand I have normal blog posts, and then I question any syndication besides RSS/ATOM - maybe I'm just not trying to grow my audience enough.
I can immediately some problems to do with content formats. Fro example, facebook lets you have a 'montage' of photos, but instagram only shows one. The music available is heavily restricted on different platforms. Video length limits are different. Etc.
Does any software let you make a main post on your own site, but then render differently to the silos?
[1]: https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party