On Crossposting

Where is your posting “home”?

You have valuable ideas. Where to post them? In what medium? Text, videos, animations, tweets?

Some years back, in the Internet’s salad days, the answers were more straightforward. You could start a blog on Blogger or Movable Type, for example, or try LiveJournal or MySpace. Today, there’s a mad variety of places to post, making it hard to choose from among them.

Why choose just one?

It’s more complicated to maintain, as you’ll see shortly, but putting the same post in several places gets you the benefit of each platforms’ different audiences and special powers. If you like to be orderly about such things, the question arises: which of these copies do you think of as the “original,” the hub of the other copies?

The savvy participants in IndieWeb have thought about this, detailing various techniques, including:

• POSE (Publish Once, Syndicate Everywhere)
• PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site)
• POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
• PESETAS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate Everything To A Silo)

I think I’m a POSSE guy.

How I’m crossposting

For me, the “Ur” copy of every post is on Pete’s Massive Wiki, which means:

• I write it in Obsidian (using Markdown)
• Save (push) it to Github
• Where Massive Wiki Builder automagically regenerates its web pages, “publishing” the new one

Then I:

• Copy that page’s contents and paste them into Substack, Medium and LinkedIn, generating the crossposts
• Copy the new page’s URL and add it to those crossposts as the Ur-link
• Add that page to my Brain, too
• Fetch the final URLs of the Substack, Medium and LinkedIn posts and add them to the Ur-post, and to my Brain (this is where I have to stay focused)
• I once would have posted to Twitter, but I won’t post to Xitter, and haven’t found a happy rhythm or community in the new alternatives, like Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads.
• Whew!

Functionally, that looks like the footer you’ll see on the Ur page, after the separating line. I don’t want to make the crossposted articles confusing, so on those, I just link back by adding “The Ur-post lives here.”

For this particular post, there’s one more stop: Pete is publishing it in his bi-weekly Plex newsletter (thanks, Pete!).

Oh, and that workflow doesn’t include any videos, or where and how I create images to use in the posts. Or what constitutes a podcast nowadays.

Useful details

The tools I’m using and the places I put them are likely to change over time. For example, I’m posting first to Github in Markdown so that my content will be available widely and openly. I could replace Github with IPFS or something else down the road.

As you can tell, this crossposting process does entail considerable manual labor (though certainly no sweat-inducing or callous-building activity). There are likely some publish-and-subscribe protocols or services like Zapier that could help me streamline it. Right now, I’m just going manual till it hurts.

I won’t crosspost everything, everywhere. Today, everything will start in Massive Wiki, then go to Substack. So if you’d like the simpler way of seeing everything, subscribe to my Substack (more about what I’m doing there in a subsequent post).

There’s another big reason why I’m posting to Massive Wiki first: In the near future, Massive Wiki will be more like a wiki, meaning it will be the home of “living” documents that improve over time through comments, edits and forks (another thing to flesh out in subsequent posts).

About as important as the distribution of posts is the choice of medium for the posts. So far, most of my Substack posts are text with a few images, but I love recording videos, which I normally post first to YouTube. Finally, the definition of a podcast has drifted a bit to include videos, and it’s also easier to make an audio or video post part of a podcast. I’ll be doing more of those.

The crossposting strategy I’ve described here definitely increases the risk that folks who do follow me on multiple platforms will see duplicate posts. I hope they will adapt, centering on their easiest or favorite way. If duplicate overload becomes a big issue, I may need to rethink this approach.

Lmk what you think! And what you do.

The Ur-post lives here.