Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]

From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:

1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.

2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.

3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.

[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html

We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:

- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information

- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups

- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings

- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged

Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.

One of the biggest steps down in Facebook history was their removal of RSS syndication. There was a time in the past when you could subscribe your Facebook account to external RSS feeds. The entries in those feeds would create new content on your "Facebook wall". This essentially let you use any third party that supported RSS to publish content into your Facebook feed.

Facebook removed that feature. The effect of this was that people had to create content within facebook instead of outside it. This reoriented the flow of content creation so that it must originate inside of Facebook, removing the ability to use FB as a passive consumer of content created in a workflow where the creators chose the entire flow.

IMHO this is one of the biggest steps down ever in FB history. It was one of the biggest attacks on the open web, and I'm sad to say that it mostly worked, and the internet at large is worse as a result.

I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025

I'd like to have a POSSE setup for video with a landing page, a static image and transcript, a download button for very slowly downloading the video, metadata and links to instantly-available external copies so that I can channel as much of the server costs that video entails to the big platforms.

Has anybody written about adapting POSSE for videos?

Very similar to what I’m building with opal editor. The “site” is static markdown which lives and is stored in your browser, css, images, markdown and html. You can keep it as is with markdown or compile to html. From there you can easily push to vercel GitHub cloudflare netlify. Cheating the server less bit of it by using CORS proxies

https://opaledx.com

https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal

MIT and open source no documentation yet. But coming very soon

I take this approach with everything I post, though I only syndicate to Mastodon. I have an RSS and JSON feed for each of the content types (they all have different schema) on my site: posts, links, books, movies, concerts, status updates and a combined feed. I also maintain an ICS calendar subscription of upcoming album releases.

These items, in turn, can be optionally syndicated to Mastodon when published. For status updates, I have a field that supports Mastodon-specific text (for mentions and so forth).

I also expose an oembed endpoint that returns the appropriate data for each content type for platforms that support it.

Everything I read is from RSS feeds I follow via freshRSS. Links are saved to linkding and are transformed into TTS "podcasts" that are sent to audiobookshelf.

This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS

I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.

I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.

I just started building my own website today with Django. I’m doing it because I just enjoy doing it. Most of my work is in data and ML infrastructure and it is just killing me. Working on the front end has opened my mind to possibility and given me new inspiration.

I love hn and was inspired by all the devs who have their own site. I was drowning in work, but put the Django architecture together on vacation, started putting things together today and it’s been a blast.

I don’t enjoy social media and was thinking to posse intrinsically.

I appreciate this post and the authors perspective.

EchoFeed is a lovely service to enable this regardless of what service you use to publish on your own site (so long as it supports RSS/Atom/JSON). I've used it to good effect for my blog in the past.

https://echofeed.app/

I've used Twitter to publish my thoughts for years. In the beginning, I'd write multiple threads to get my points across.

Then, when Twitter started supporting longer tweets, I started publishing essays and it got the job done.

But at the end of each year, it was really hard to trace all my posts and write reviews about them. That's exactly what brought me to POSSE. I've been maintaining my blog[1] since early 2020 and it feels really good to know that I own my stuff. Plus, over the years, it has opened up so many doors for me.

Too bad many of these walled-garden platforms have now started to demote posts if they contain external URLs. I'm battling that by posting the links as a comment to the original post, which contains a cover photo of the blog.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

I don't do any syndication so my self-published site is simply a POS :'(

Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:

https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025

> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server

At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around automation and/or api usage can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.

The concept seems trivial and widely used by many existing bloggers (and the default for most media outlets) so I feel like I'm missing something.

Don't most social platforms tank reach if you add a link to your post or as a first comment?

Just discovered https://posseparty.com/ to ease your cross-posting.

I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself

I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing

I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually. If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...

Downside is “elsewhere” is going to cut your reach when you post a link because they want their users to stay in their estate.

This is my approach and I fully recommend it. My personal website is my canonical home address on the web. It has outlived a few platforms and many rounds of enshittification.

A few caveats:

- You will have different communities on each social network. Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users, it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of choice.

- Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly different messaging. This is partly due to the format each platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different conversations.

- Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine participant in each community, even if you just repost the same stuff. Automation does not help much there.

- RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control, and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly want to follow you might never see your updates.

- You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on the internet, and it should stay yours

- People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.

You can tell it's a good idea because Facebook and other "big enough to crush instead of cooperate" media sites down-rank you for doing it

Medium API is mentioned

But this is no longer available.

You have to copy and paste the article into Medium manually unfortunately.

How do you fellow HN'ers separate their online with their corporate identity and day job?

I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/ your employer.

Anyone got experience to share in that regard?

Thinking about this famous precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195#27425041

I still feel RSS was the pinnacle. Of course it’s a personal preference, but I much prefer letting people pull my content than pushing it onto them.

Related:

Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055

A website to destroy all websites

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784

I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices

It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!

Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.

Awesome initiative. Will delve into this. It's how the web should be.

If only HN had been doing this almost since it's inception. Oh wait.

Someone recommended Posse Party in a now deleted comment, but beware its (ambiguous and poorly written, if you ask me) noncommercial license:

https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...

kkkjh

POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!

In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.

Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.

This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.