What is POSSE and how it changed how I use social media
POSSE stands for "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". It means a content is published on a site you own first, then you publish the same thing on social media, such as Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.
I started blogging in 2014 (you can still go and read the very first post!). It started as I believe how most people start their blogs: press publish, then nothing happens, 0 visitors for quite some time.
The natural next step was to go and publish links on sites I frequented. Back then, that was Reddit's /r/programming, so I posted there. Soon enough, I got shadow-banned. It says in its rules:
If a majority of your contributions to reddit constitute self-promotion, you will be banned
Of course, there is ways to game this system, but I did not want to do that. Promoting my content there is not welcome, so I stopped doing that.
I kept writing articles (more than 300 to date) and getting some traffic from search engines and also a decent amount of subscribes to the newsletter. Over the years I tried different things, like creating email-based courses and played with the design.
Then recently I read about POSSE and it changed how I view posting to social media.
The error in my thinking was that by posting links or backlinked articles I'm getting free advertisement for my content so platforms don't like that. But it's actually not about my content, it's about the readers.
POSSE is about posting content on a platform that people use, so me posting a link there is actually a good thing: instead of making someone subscribe to my RSS feed, I bring the content to the platform they use. Recently I got some positive feedback that people like to read the content I post on social media.
The POSSE site, it says it quite well:
Let your friends read your posts, their way.
So, why Reddit does not like self promotion?
The difference is that Reddit is a global feed, while LinkedIn or Facebook have individual feeds per publisher. That means if somebody posts a link on Reddit, everyone gets that, but if I publish on LinkedIn it is only sent to the people who are already interested (plus a few others, depending on the algorithm). Self-promotion in a push model is bad as it will fill up the global feed with subpar content, but in a pull model it's good because if somebody is not interested they just won't follow.
It's also good for the platform: the more content they have the easier their audience can find interesting topics. Medium even allows me to set the canonical link for a published post.
So, here I am, after 10 years of creating content finally getting some of the basics right.
