re: Publish once, syndicate nowhere
Courtney was featured on People & Blogs this week and among other things he talked about, he linked to his post from last September, "Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere".
I know I read this before, but the contents of the post escaped my mind today. It's possible I skimmed through it rather than giving it a proper read, I'm not sure. But given some of the feelings I have recently, the notion of "POSN" pinged something in my brain and I wanted to read (or re-read) his post. To be honest, I'm surprised to discover that this was written almost a year ago; I could have sworn I read it in 2025. Time moves fast, as always.
I'm not going to summarize his post, you should go read it. It's not lengthy, Firefox's reader mode estimates 8-10 minutes. For myself, I read it in between work tasks so it took longer, but either way it's time well spent.
I agree with the tenant of POSSE: that you should own your content on your own piece of the web, and share it via other mediums (aka social media). You should not be beholden to Substack or Wordpress (or even Bearblog), because you don't entirely own your own work, whatever the relevant Terms & Conditions might say. But where I start seeing cracks is the "syndicate elsewhere" part of it.
To be clear, I'm fine with RSS. I'm talking about shouting to social media, "read my thing!". I think that's where Courtney and I are on the same page, or at least that's where I am lately. I feel a little weird about posting my stuff on social media, as if I'm desperate for people to read what I write. I mean, I do want people to read what I write, let's not kid ourselves.
This paragraph specifically echoes my thoughts:
I recently wrote a short note about fatigue and opted not to repost on Mastodon. My first thought was about engagement; if I don’t share my words, do they even exist? What about the replies, the favorites, the coveted boosts? I write about writing for myself, but am I really, if one of my first concerns is about the recognition from others? Sure, what I write is very specific, very personal, but still I’ve caught myself looking for that IV drip of attention and I despise it. Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate when my words find resonance with someone, but I abhor the very idea of engagement driving me. I’m nobody. I don’t need to be engaging. I just need to be me.
Very recently I posted what was meant to be a motivational post to other people. I mentioned in it my feelings of not being seen, and a few people reached out to me. At the time I was appreciative (I still am!) - I heard from people who previously I had not heard from. It was nice, a little dopamine hit. But as I thought about it a little more over the last week, I can't help but feel that I unintentionally wrote something out of self-pity.
That wasn't what I meant, but it came out that way. And I have my echofeed dashboard set up to only share posts on social media that I want to go out, by giving posts a specific tag (#echo). Initially it was because I didn't want certain posts going to Bluesky. But now it's going to be "unless I really think I should share it".
Because I realized today (before I read Manu's interview with Courtney) that I was sharing my posts on Mastodon because I wanted people to react to what I wrote. Some people who read my stuff get the links from when I post it there, and not via my RSS feed; so if I don't share it on Mastodon, I don't get to hear "oh great post!" And that's the primary reason I share to Mastodon: because I want people to talk to me and tell me they like what I wrote.
I recently started a blog elsewhere that I don't share at all. It's something I use to post whatever I want, without caring much about structure, formatting, coherent thoughts, etc. I'd like to know people are reading it, but it's not my primary concern. That should be the same here. I want my work to stand on its own. If people want to reach out to me - it's super easy to do so. Every single one of my posts has links at the bottom to reach out to me.
I guess for a little while I'm going to stop tagging my posts for wide-spread sharing. Call it an experiment if you want, but for me I'm going to call it something to reduce my addiction to the "like" or "reply" buttons.