Me and my Posse

In my wading into all things indieweb of late, I’d successfully implemented both sending my blog posts out as webmentions, and recieving and displaying webmention replies beneath them.

Then I’m thinking, what if I wanted to reply to someone, via a webmention, but not in a blog post? Well, you can reply from any publicly accessible html so you could just create a html document with the reply and send the mention. How most people deal with this though, is to create a note template and have them appear on their site away from their articles. So, never one to be radical, that’s what I’ve done. For example, here is a note used as a reply to Kev Quirk.

Now that I have a notes collection I can use them for both replies and for micro blogging.

Back to the stupid names

Next on the list, apparently, was setting up POSSE for my content. Recently I complemented the solid naming of webmentions, well, we’re quickly back down to earth with this one. It’s a daft acronym that stands for some bullshit, don’t worry about it.

It’s the workflow of posting some content on your website and then cross posting all around the web to any and all places you feel like, with a link back to your single source of truth. The primary use case is the syndication of article summaries or notes from personal sites to twitter, facebook, and linkedin (big blue?), but the concept is the same for all platforms.

There are many ways to automate the cross posting, there are services and tools aplenty to grab your content and send it off to hit silo APIs hither and thither. However, I have zero interest in adding my content anywhere except the open www and the fediverse, so the question is, should I bother?

Syndicate to federate

Not really, no. I’m not going to write a note on my site for it to get scooped up and posted to mastodon with a link back. I’m not going to reply to someone on the fediverse by writing a note on my site with a reply-to url. I host my own mastodon instance, my posts are already under my control, and I can live without my bullshit post about having another coffee being alongside my longer form bullshit posts about liking coffee.

I can see the value for writers with an audience who want to broadcast out everywhere with everything. I really don’t see it working as a vehicle for conversations. I see how it could function with comment and response, but that’s not how I use these platforms, for me they will always be just big dysfunctional chatrooms.

So what now?

I’ll use the notes to send comments to blog posts, I may even occasionally use them to post actual microblog posts when I have a thought or event I’d like to document on my site. In this case, it’s likely I’ll also want to post on mastodon. If and when this happens, I’ll just manually post it.