Category: Facebook

POSSE: Put Social Media Where it Belongs (Second)

~ Indy

There are plenty of problems and things to worry about with Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media sites you may use. Data privacy, addictive behaviors, concentration of power, the list goes on and on.

On the other hand, it’s hard to resist the popular sites where all the users are. For organizers and activists like us in the Indivisible movement, it’s even more important to be where all the users are. But accepting the necessity of posting to social media doesn’t mean you have to depend completely on those services.

One approach, which has been around for years but is still relevant today, is called “POSSE”, defined by its proponents like this:

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with links back to the original on your site.

The idea is simply that you should have your own independent web site (hosted here on Indivisible.blue, for example), and it’s the primary source. It’s fully under your control in terms of ownership and content, and it’s on the “open web”, that doesn’t require anyone to have a login to anything. Links to items on your site – events, news, calls to action, the Trump Outrage Du Jour, kitten pictures, whatever – can then be shared on whatever Facebook page, Twitter feed, or Medium thing you want.

This cross-posting can be accomplished in a number of ways. WordPress and Jetpack provide connection to the primary sites, and the indie-web network Micro.blog also provides syndication (as well as simple, inexpensive hosting).

Own and control your content, even if you still feed it to the social media beasts. If you have questions or suggestions on this, don’t hesitate to let me know.

And We’re Back

~ Indy

…and ready to try to post more regularly here. I’ve spiffed up the theme and tidied up the details of what this is about. Though the network continues to proudly host sites for many groups, this site has looked abandoned for too long. Will I stick to posting better than I did with the three (3) “weekly updates” I posted through all of 2017? Follow along to find out!

I’ve become more and more concerned about the power that the giant, corporate social networks have over our lives, information, and discourse, and will probably tend to post about that. For example, this TED talk about Facebook’s role in Brexit:

And if you’re interested in that, her behind-the-scenes account of giving that talk is also fascinating:

In the theatre, senior executives of Facebook had been “warned” beforehand. And within minutes of stepping off stage, I was told that its press team had already lodged an official complaint. In fairness, what multi-billion dollar corporation with armies of PRs, lawyers and crisis teams… wouldn’t want to push back on the charge that it has broken democracy?

Facebook’s difficulty is that it had no grounds to challenge my statement. No counter-evidence. If it was innocent of all charges, why hasn’t Mark Zuckerberg come to Britain and answered parliament’s questions? Though a member of the TED team told me, before the session had even ended, that Facebook had raised a serious challenge to the talk to claim “factual inaccuracies” and she warned me that they had been obliged to send them my script. What factual inaccuracies, we both wondered. “Let’s see what they come back with in the morning,” she said. Spoiler: they never did.