I signed up for Twitter back in 2007. It was a simpler time. It was a simpler Twitter. I really enjoyed using the service and didn’t mind gradually contributing more and more content there. I became aware of the fact that this came at the cost of making less regular updates to my own blog. I made peace with that as I had more interesting conversations on Twitter than in the comments of my blog. I didn’t mind essentially trading RSS feeds for Twitter lists. I traded ownership for convenience. Everything is a compromise and that felt reasonable at the time.
Today, I’m evaluating that compromise and considering an alternative. I’m trying to think of my personal site as less of a “blog” and more of a “digital garden”. That’s a whole other post, but the significance here is: this has reduced friction to writing for me and got me more excited to post than I’ve been in a while. As I create more, I think more about workflow and tooling. I want my garden to be canonical and it looks like some smart people sorted out a reasonable strategy for this by the name POSSE .
One does not simply comment on a static site
Most dynamic content management systems ship with some sort of comment feature, but that’s less trivial to implement with a static site. There’s a lot of ways to handle this, but I want to lean into the Webmention recommendation.
When you publish a post with links to other sites, your site can send a webmention notification to sites that accept them to inform them that they were linked to.
A webmention receiver provides discovery of their webmention endpoint so it can be found by others who link to the page. When a receiver’s endpoint receives a webmention notification, it looks up the sender’s post and may display it as a response.
Mentions mainly require a link to the recipient on the page, but they can be enhanced into more meaningful responses (such as comments, reposts, or likes) by adding microformats to the sender’s post.
You could say there’s still a compromise in that I don’t “own the engagement”. But, as I stated, everything is a compromise and I think I like this compromise better. I want to own my content, but I don’t feel a need to own the interactions with my content. Enabling readers to comment where they like and aggregate that on my site feels like a reasonable thing to do.
Ok, but what is POSSE!?
POSSE stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.” The concept is straightforward, but implementation can be a little tricky. In a nutshell though, by opting into a few microformats, you can enrich the site you control with engagement that occurs on platforms you don’t.
The POSSE Workflow as I understand it
This is getting a bit abstract, so I’ll reign it in with some concrete examples. At the moment, I’m enjoying publishing my content via Astro. Nothing about my workflow is unique to Astro, just the implementation details. Once you have content available on the web, sharing via a platform like Mastodon satisfies the “syndication” bit. Assuming you have your site setup to consume Webmentions, you can use Bridgy to convert Mastodon replies to webmentions that you can display on your own blog.
Where do we go from here?
I’m currently folding ideas from this post into my blog. At the moment, I don’t have syndication automated. I’m cautious about appearing overly promotional as I navigate this new approach. I’ve shared a couple posts to Mastodon and replies prove my workflow is functioning as intended.
If you find this useful, hit me up on Mastodon or Bluesky. If I have something wrong or you find a bug in my blog, I’d love to see it as an issue.
Published by Ryan Parsley