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.
RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise. I guess this makes sense—hard to monetize views through an RSS reader
Please also enable CORS[1] for your RSS feed. (If your whole site is a static site, then please just enable CORS site-wide. This is how GitHub Pages works. There's pretty much no reason not to.)
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
Now that browser developers did their best to kill RSS/Atom...
Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the `link` element?
Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom visually in the page, too?
(On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message about the MIME content type.)
Is there any reason today to use RSS over Atom? Atom sounds like it has all the advantages, except maybe compatibility with some old or stubborn clients?
Based on my own personal usage, it makes total sense that RSS feeds still get a surprising number of hits. I have a small collection of blogs that I follow and it's much easier to have them all loaded up in my RSS reader of choice than it is to regularly stop by each blog in my browser, especially for blogs that seldomly post (and are easy to forget about).
Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them have style normalization for example and native reader apps support offline reading.
If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps for other types of web content…
The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.
I find browsing and discovering fun. So, after years of lurking I decided to make my own directory. It is called Top Four (https://topfour.net).
A /top4 page is a personal webpage where you can share your definitive ranked list of your top 3 favorites and an honorable mention. In a specific topic, such as movies, albums, snacks, games, or anything else you feel strongly about. Or read the announcement: https://peterspath.net/blog/project-top-four/
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 guess it happens when engineers stop driving decisions and the finance people take over. Won't be too good for the company's valuation if people can access the content elsewhere.
I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.
I must say, it's delightful to see this on the front page of HN.
A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11 years, but you can use just about anything.
What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats, webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites. The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human community.
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.
You can have both! POSSE to post multiple places. PESOS to pull in anything posted directly in other places, i.e. anything that didn't originate from a POSSE post.
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.
Have you looked at https://posseparty.com/ as a possible option? Supports integrations with those platforms and more, and "all" it needs is an Atom feed!
If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
I know it’s gotten some push back but to be honest I’m fond of the more manual approach that you take on HN.
While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.
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.
>the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.
You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.
These are impressive metrics, are you able to make a living off of your 10M views?
I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content, mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work too, might consider that as well
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
That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
I can confirm. I post across 5 platforms and each has its own regulars and its own vibe. The tone of my posts is slightly different on each.
The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages about what I am current working on, but the actual finished product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not result in lost information.
Great to see this here. I’ve been using EchoFeed (https://echofeed.app) to syndicate articles from my blog to social media (it uses RSS as the feed source). I also recently learned about POSSEparty (https://posseparty.com) which has more options but is self hosted.
RSS most certainly isn’t dead either. I run pagecord.com (indie blogging app) and the majority of traffic is from a huge variety of feed readers.
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.
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?
POSSE Party (http://posseparty.com) supports syndicating YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels, but trying to syndicate longer form video just didn't make sense IMO
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.
Q: While I agree strongly with the philosophy of this article, and twice I have set up static site generators for blogs hanging underneath my top level personal domain markwatson.com, each time I cause I could only blog when sitting at my computer, not when I was using an iPad or iPhone (I limit my daily time at a computer to just a few writing and coding sprints, otherwise I literally put my laptop away - out of sight out of mind).
Does anyone know of any mobile friendly static site generators?
I think I have about 3000 blog articles between Substack and Blogspot.
If you set up the static site generator as a CI/CD action in you favorite git provider, can work with both hosted GitHub, GitLab, etc. or self hosted Forgejo [1], you have both version control for your blog as well as an automatic way of publishing.
Sure, the UX is not that great as with a dedicated interface like substack, but building a Hugo site is really just editing markdown files anyway, most mobile git enabled editors should be able to do that.
You could use Substack/Blogspot/Mastodon themselves as your "static site generator".
POSSE (the concept linked here) is overrepresented in relation to revealed preference. PESOS (publish elsewhere, syndicate on site) is more compatible with how most people (including nerds) actually use the Internet; for all the talk about static site generators and "owning" your own "digital garden" >9/10 people would fall somewhere on the embarrassing part of the curve from the "Blogging vs. Blog Setups" comic. <https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/>
If you migrated to a fediverse instance with longer post length limits, you could use that to actually blog/post while mobile, and meanwhile you have a script on your homepage that "lazily" syncs those posts to your static site—
When anyone visits your homepage, they see your site as it was when you last built it.
When you visit your own homepage, it automatically fetches your social media feed, patches the previous input to the SSG with the new content, and then uses the APIs of whatever you're using to host your site for rolling out the new posts.
You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them anywhere you want.
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.
However, I suffer from a lack of high-quality news sources, no matter whether they support RSS. They no longer publish online these days. And, realistically, I am not interested in most post from people I am interested in. So I just manually poll some times a month in my browser.
A related idea that I'd like to see more people do. If you have 10-20 tweets on a subject, plug the holes and turn them into an essay on the real internet. My first step in writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763 was to copy a bunch of tweets into a doc.
Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.
I started POSSE microblogging. My website has an “etc.” section for tweet-like posts. It relieved the pressure to create HN-worthy posts every time. It also gives me a place to share art and links.
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
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.
This parallels the learning paradigm of diving into some topic, write a blog post to solidify, practice, demonstrate your knowledge, and finally promote via social media. Which parallels the origin story of sharing your scientific research. It's The Way of knowledge on the internet.
I've noted here before a course from Arlington UT about this on Edx "Data, Analytics, and Learning" (2014).
Nice to have another way of describing this pattern of writing and publishing, even if it does have a funny name POSSE.
> 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.
Havent been able to figure this out for Instagram - also the only social media that is still relevant for me.
(thankfully?) never got into twitter where it seems to be easy.
Receiving webmentions can be as simple as making a custom log in nginx and just having it save all POST to the webmention URL endpoint. I love it. And sending can be done with curl or whatever you want (ie html forms without JS).
Or, you can use any of the many community projects which handle all this backend stuff and provide it as a service.
Either extreme works. I love the indieweb set of protocols for this. Other things like ActivityPub require active interaction for the cryptographic handshake at a minimum and make simple solutions infeasible despite other benefits. Indieweb can be as complex or as simple as you want.
This is pertinent. I’ll get hundreds of page views a day on a blog post and if that’s syndicated to X it’ll get 55 views, never to be seen again despite having 1200 followers.
Focus on publishing your own work. Syndicate if it’s effortless, otherwise don’t worry about it.
Never stopped doing it. And my resolve strengthened when most blogs started doing summary feeds to force people to visit —- I kept doing full text feeds as a matter of course, and if it wasn’t for the Twittergeddon, I would still be automatically posting to Twitter (now I do it to Mastodon - https://mastodon.social/@taoofmac)
I also thought this and didn’t get the point.
But the link was published 2013 and maybe for users not used to personal blogs but only social media nowadays it’s worth mentioning…
I'd prefer to write markdown, publish to my static site, and cross-post to social media. I imagine I'd also want to get an overview of - or make an ad-hoc post from - one of several accounts on one of several platforms.
I came across Posse Party and Postiz, both of which are self-hosted. It doesn't seem like either is built for this use case.
That's almost a job in itself because you have to constantly make sure not to get shadowbanned. This is probably only an option for people who already use "social media" sites in the first place.
Putting a link to your site in forum signatures was the way to go. Unfortunately, forums are 99% dead.
What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-googlify my life slowly
A single-binary static site generator would be my approach now. You can trust it to run in a few years.
I wrote my own SSG because I operate a website for a living and had specific needs. Prior to that I ran Craft CMS on the professional website and Wordpress on the personal one.
The benefit of SSGs is that the technical effort is tied to publishing. Once it’s online it stays online. You have both the human-readable source content and the static site. With traditional CMS there is a constant effort required to keep the website running. My dockerized Craft website wouldn’t start on the first few tries after a year offline.
SSGs are fantastic for building long-lasting websites with a low maintenance burden.
Definitely recommend any Static Site Generator like Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, rolling your own, etc. it’s easy to deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services and set up builds on git pushes.
Can I shamelessly self-promote Pagecord? Free plan plus super-cheap premium plan with loads of features. Also source available so self-hostable (arguably cheaper to let me do it for you!). Export in full HTML or static-site friendly Markdown so you’re not trapped.
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...
I think webmentions would be the answer there, though I don't think Bluesky currently supports it so you'd be looking at scraping rather than a push-based model.
you can just post a message on bluesky and link it to your blog post at the end with some text saying "want to comment? Reply to this post."
Personally, I prefer using webmentions. I got them back to my site using a combination of services, so if someone talk about a post I made in bluesky or mastodon, I usually get a webmention back to the post.
Posse what? You can literally publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere using anything whatsoever, including typing .html files into /var/www, if that's your thing.
It’s also a lot less wasteful and more respectful in my opinion. Scattering content everywhere in the hope others will see it doesn’t feel right to me.
The concept is sound, but the syndicate part is becoming increasingly hostile to maintain. I used to have scripts that auto-posted to twitter, facebook and reddit. Over the last two years, almost all of those broke due to API paywalls or aggressive bot detection.
I've found that "POSSE" is shifting more toward "Publish on Own Site, Manually Link Elsewhere."
Paradoxically, ActivityPub (mastodon/fediverse) is the only place where true automated syndication is still reliable. I think the future of POSSE isn't trying to hack together API keys for walled gardens, but treating your personal site as a fedi instance so the syndication is native.
Feeder on Android is my pick.
Thunderbird does RSS, and I already use it for email, so it's a nice all in one on Linux.
Both can use OPML files to import/export your feeds.
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.
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.
I've found that managing the conversations across venues is way harder than publishing to them, and POSSE doesn't address this except for one line about backfeeds/"reverse syndication", which most mainstream services either don't support or actively sabotage. It easily takes more effort to engage across services than to post across them.
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.
I only work for small companies that don’t have any business interest in areas where I want to maintain independent side projects.
When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got acquired my a major corporation that did have business interests which overlapped with my side projects, I refused the bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving about a year later.
Don’t get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
IDK, your average boss is just a dude who has bills to pay and mouths to feed. They don't really care what happens as long as you're not doing something stupid, especially visibly and on their time.
My experience is that bosses read my blog, then when they or a fellow manager need to hire someone, have reached out to me asking me to apply. So it cuts both ways - maybe your shitty boss sees you blogging and sharing your experience, but a good boss will see that and go "I want this passionate and curious person to work for me".
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
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.
I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one to talk to at all about many things.
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.
susam|1 month ago
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
ronbenton|1 month ago
pwdisswordfishy|1 month ago
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
1. <https://enable-cors.org/>
neilv|1 month ago
Does a Web site practically need to do anything to advertise their feed to the diehard RSS/Atom users, other than use the `link` element?
Is there a worthwhile convention for advertising RSS/Atom visually in the page, too?
(On one site, I tried adding an "RSS" icon, linking to the Atom feed XML, alongside all the usual awful social media site icons. But then I removed it, because I was afraid it would confuse visitors who weren't very Web savvy, and maybe get their browser displaying XML or showing them an error message about the MIME content type.)
frogulis|1 month ago
cosmic_cheese|1 month ago
Readers come with some nice bonus features, too. All of them have style normalization for example and native reader apps support offline reading.
If only there were purpose-built open standards and client apps for other types of web content…
vasco|1 month ago
renegat0x0|1 month ago
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
ekianjo|1 month ago
peterspath|1 month ago
Like:
- https://nownownow.com
- https://defaults.rknight.me
- https://aboutideasnow.com
- https://chrisburnell.github.io/interests-directory/
- https://bukmark.club/directory/
- https://uses.tech
I find browsing and discovering fun. So, after years of lurking I decided to make my own directory. It is called Top Four (https://topfour.net).
A /top4 page is a personal webpage where you can share your definitive ranked list of your top 3 favorites and an honorable mention. In a specific topic, such as movies, albums, snacks, games, or anything else you feel strongly about. Or read the announcement: https://peterspath.net/blog/project-top-four/
Zaskoda|1 month ago
- 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.
RyanOD|1 month ago
1000x yes to this! It can be really frustrating when a link takes me to FB, TW, IG, etc. - none of which I use.
theshrike79|1 month ago
hoherd|1 month ago
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.
wombatpm|1 month ago
clickety_clack|1 month ago
sehugg|1 month ago
0xpgm|1 month ago
I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
benwerd|1 month ago
A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11 years, but you can use just about anything.
What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats, webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites. The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human community.
doodlesdev|2 months ago
[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
j45|1 month ago
performative|1 month ago
kgwxd|1 month ago
simonw|1 month ago
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
jamietanna|1 month ago
echelon|1 month ago
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
tolerance|1 month ago
While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.
foxfired|1 month ago
I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
mtlynch|1 month ago
I don't think this is correct unless you mean strictly the number of HTTP requests to your web server.
You were the 9th most popular blogger on HN in 2025.[0] Your post says you have about 500 readers via RSS. How can that represent more readers than people who read your posts through HN? I'd guess HN brought you about 1M visitors in 2025 based on the number of your front page posts.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
casualscience|1 month ago
I'm planning to leave my job this year and focus on content, mostly have been considering YouTube, but if blogging can work too, might consider that as well
NetOpWibby|1 month ago
I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.
nunobrito|1 month ago
softwaredoug|1 month ago
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
alabut|1 month ago
Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.
nicbou|1 month ago
The general idea for me is that I crosspost short messages about what I am current working on, but the actual finished product is self-hosted. Deleting any of the accounts will not result in lost information.
Yokohiii|1 month ago
lylo|1 month ago
RSS most certainly isn’t dead either. I run pagecord.com (indie blogging app) and the majority of traffic is from a huge variety of feed readers.
judah|1 month ago
rednafi|1 month ago
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
OgsyedIE|1 month ago
Has anybody written about adapting POSSE for videos?
searls|1 month ago
fsflover|1 month ago
cdrnsf|1 month ago
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.
mark_l_watson|1 month ago
Does anyone know of any mobile friendly static site generators?
I think I have about 3000 blog articles between Substack and Blogspot.
paulwetzel|1 month ago
Sure, the UX is not that great as with a dedicated interface like substack, but building a Hugo site is really just editing markdown files anyway, most mobile git enabled editors should be able to do that.
[1]: https://home.futuretim.io/posts/hugo_build_and_post/
pwdisswordfishy|1 month ago
POSSE (the concept linked here) is overrepresented in relation to revealed preference. PESOS (publish elsewhere, syndicate on site) is more compatible with how most people (including nerds) actually use the Internet; for all the talk about static site generators and "owning" your own "digital garden" >9/10 people would fall somewhere on the embarrassing part of the curve from the "Blogging vs. Blog Setups" comic. <https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/>
If you migrated to a fediverse instance with longer post length limits, you could use that to actually blog/post while mobile, and meanwhile you have a script on your homepage that "lazily" syncs those posts to your static site—
When anyone visits your homepage, they see your site as it was when you last built it.
When you visit your own homepage, it automatically fetches your social media feed, patches the previous input to the SSG with the new content, and then uses the APIs of whatever you're using to host your site for rolling out the new posts.
us-merul|1 month ago
bjhess|1 month ago
https://echofeed.app/
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|1 month ago
0xis|1 month ago
However, I suffer from a lack of high-quality news sources, no matter whether they support RSS. They no longer publish online these days. And, realistically, I am not interested in most post from people I am interested in. So I just manually poll some times a month in my browser.
cosmicgadget|1 month ago
Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:
https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
moultano|1 month ago
Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.
nicbou|1 month ago
rbbydotdev|1 month ago
https://opaledx.com
https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
MIT and open source no documentation yet. But coming very soon
lazarus01|1 month ago
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.
subdavis|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
nesk_|1 month ago
xtiansimon|1 month ago
I've noted here before a course from Arlington UT about this on Edx "Data, Analytics, and Learning" (2014).
Nice to have another way of describing this pattern of writing and publishing, even if it does have a funny name POSSE.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46015121 https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/19117279/CSC...
mands|1 month ago
joeross|1 month ago
ChrisArchitect|1 month ago
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
merelysounds|1 month ago
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.
theturtletalks|1 month ago
0. https://buffer.com
1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app
acessoproibido|1 month ago
superkuh|1 month ago
Or, you can use any of the many community projects which handle all this backend stuff and provide it as a service.
Either extreme works. I love the indieweb set of protocols for this. Other things like ActivityPub require active interaction for the cryptographic handshake at a minimum and make simple solutions infeasible despite other benefits. Indieweb can be as complex or as simple as you want.
nacozarina|1 month ago
lylo|1 month ago
Focus on publishing your own work. Syndicate if it’s effortless, otherwise don’t worry about it.
Blogging lives! :)
rcarmo|1 month ago
crashabr|1 month ago
starkparker|1 month ago
MichaelWhi|1 month ago
yunesj|1 month ago
I came across Posse Party and Postiz, both of which are self-hosted. It doesn't seem like either is built for this use case.
Which direction would you go in?
searls|1 month ago
https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml gets flung to 8 social accounts
xenophonf|1 month ago
https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
ozim|1 month ago
ryu2k2|1 month ago
That's almost a job in itself because you have to constantly make sure not to get shadowbanned. This is probably only an option for people who already use "social media" sites in the first place. Putting a link to your site in forum signatures was the way to go. Unfortunately, forums are 99% dead.
ricardobeat|1 month ago
askvictor|1 month ago
nicbou|1 month ago
I wrote my own SSG because I operate a website for a living and had specific needs. Prior to that I ran Craft CMS on the professional website and Wordpress on the personal one.
The benefit of SSGs is that the technical effort is tied to publishing. Once it’s online it stays online. You have both the human-readable source content and the static site. With traditional CMS there is a constant effort required to keep the website running. My dockerized Craft website wouldn’t start on the first few tries after a year offline.
SSGs are fantastic for building long-lasting websites with a low maintenance burden.
pastel8739|1 month ago
lylo|1 month ago
https://github.com/lylo/pagecord
manuelmoreale|1 month ago
theshrike79|1 month ago
ketzo|1 month ago
acessoproibido|1 month ago
pwdisswordfishy|1 month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482285
aussieguy1234|1 month ago
But this is no longer available.
You have to copy and paste the article into Medium manually unfortunately.
maknee|1 month ago
[1] https://maknee.github.io/blog/
jbreckmckye|1 month ago
I guess it could just be done as a multi phase post, as janky as that is.
randoglando|1 month ago
You can inspect and see the JS. There are a few others doing this too!
_heimdall|1 month ago
soapdog|1 month ago
Personally, I prefer using webmentions. I got them back to my site using a combination of services, so if someone talk about a post I made in bluesky or mastodon, I usually get a webmention back to the post.
LightBug1|1 month ago
kazinator|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
ronbenton|1 month ago
manuelmoreale|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
Fiveplus|1 month ago
I've found that "POSSE" is shifting more toward "Publish on Own Site, Manually Link Elsewhere."
Paradoxically, ActivityPub (mastodon/fediverse) is the only place where true automated syndication is still reliable. I think the future of POSSE isn't trying to hack together API keys for walled gardens, but treating your personal site as a fedi instance so the syndication is native.
pastel8739|1 month ago
noisy_boy|1 month ago
notme43|1 month ago
theshrike79|1 month ago
talideon|1 month ago
est|1 month ago
jjude|1 month ago
For example: This is rss for Simon Willison: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/rss
datadrivenangel|1 month ago
pmdr|1 month ago
als0|1 month ago
Thorrez|1 month ago
XCSme|1 month ago
dieselgate|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
nicbou|1 month ago
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.
starkparker|1 month ago
ishweta|1 month ago
sneak|1 month ago
esafak|1 month ago
jdthedisciple|1 month ago
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
rectang|1 month ago
When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got acquired my a major corporation that did have business interests which overlapped with my side projects, I refused the bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving about a year later.
Don’t get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
sailorganymede|1 month ago
decryption|1 month ago
RadiozRadioz|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
uwagar|1 month ago
neves|1 month ago
jamietanna|1 month ago
ishweta|1 month ago
GaryBluto|1 month ago
maximgeorge|1 month ago
[deleted]
vikas-sharma|1 month ago
[deleted]
ivaibhavgupta|1 month ago
[deleted]
156890237|1 month ago
vegabook|1 month ago
torh|1 month ago
BeetleB|1 month ago
But it's not an either/or proposition.
Also, keep in mind that POSSE and this site predate LLMs by quite a bit.
ozgrakkurt|1 month ago
Some people are just using it to post more garbage into the platforms they already were using
dingnuts|1 month ago
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater
theturtletalks|1 month ago
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.