Note 70: Me and my POSSE

Happy Thanksgiving to all of out there surfing the Cyberspace!

I’m currently sitting in a hotel outside of Fort Worth biding my time before the annual Thanksgiving feast with my brother-in-law’s family, so I figured I’d write a bit about some of the changes I’ve been involved with and monitoring over the past year. (Warning: this is going to sound like a lot of Star Trek technobabble to some of you, as I’ll be discussing the 21st century equivalent of adjusting the phase modulators to optimize the tachyon output of the dilithium crystals.)

First of all, if you’re reading this, you already have joined me on one of those changes – moving this newsletter off of the centralized Substack platform onto a self-hosted installation of the open source Ghost newsletter software. While Substack has been a decent host, there have been some elements that I wanted to change, but was prevented from doing so, on account of not actually controlling the underlying servers and software. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was wanting to integrate a self-hosted web analytics platform, and Substack only supported the major platforms (Google Analytics, et al.) with no avenue for me to drop a little bit of Javascript in those pages that would allow the Umami-based system I’m running to capture the traffic. Another aspect that appealed to me with Ghost is their ongoing work integrating these newsletters into the Fediverse, and I figured it made sense to move my content over, given my ongoing investment and involvement with Mastodon.

This month’s election results were also pushing me to move. While I don’t have any reason to think anything bad would happen had I stayed on Substack, I am expecting the incoming administration to be rather proactive when it comes to meddling with large platforms’ content moderation decisions, and while Facebook is the one on whom guns are trained, I fully expect that the Eye of Mordor would sweep over Substack and exacerbate the existing issues that the Substack struggles with when it comes to harassing and extremist content. Finally, I’ve been deploying Ghost for a variety of other projects, and felt that the platform was in a decent shape to make the jump.

Underlying all of this is a decade(s)-old philosophy called POSSE: (P)ublish on (O)wn (S)ite, (S)yndicate (E)lsewhere. The idea behind this approach is to make your own server the canonical and original source of your content, and then share that content to whatever platform or site you wish, with the goal of directing readers back to your site (as you are now) to be able to build an audience independently of those who may have interests that don’t align with your own. When you control the site where the content lives, you don’t have to worry about it being blackholed by an algorithm, being blocked or removed by moderators not doing their jobs properly, or having your audience held hostage by a third party – which seems to be a common rationale for folks who want to leave Twitter these days, but feel trapped there.

Over the past couple of years, as enshittification of Big Tech services has been accelerating, I’ve been working to move my digital homestead off of others’ platforms and onto servers that I set up and control. I can choose to participate and share on those platforms, but the risk I run from them is reduced from being existential to merely annoying? Maybe there’s a Facebook moderator who finds this post problematic? That’s Facebook’s loss, as I can make it available via other channels. After Brendan Carr’s FCC neuters larger platform’s ability to moderate and deal with trolls, I can deal with them here locally with the moderation tools that I have, or end up creating to deal with the headache. If I find that LLMs are stealing my content to train models, I have a whole toolbox of things I can do to address that, from blocking them by User Agent, or returning poison content to requesting IP ranges that are hosting those scrapers. I don’t have to roll over and take it, and should I participate, it provides me a mechanism for me to get paid for my work.

In many respects, this is returning to the original ethos of the web, before the massive centralization that sucked people into Facebook, Twitter, and others’ massive walled gardens. We host our own stuff, promote it by sharing and networking with others, and have options for dealing with folks we’d rather take a walk into the Abyss. So far, I’m hosting this newsletter on Ghost. I’ve replaced Google Analytics with Umami for web analytics purposes. I’m hosting my own Mastodon server. And I’ll host my own Bluesky server once that becomes possible. I’m looking at running my own password management server (Bitwarden).

It's a bit of work on my part to get this all set up, but the bulk of that is behind me now. All that’s left is to party like it’s (the Internet’s) 1999. If anyone would like to join me and would like pointers or guidance, let me know and I’ll be happy to share what I’ve learned (and what to avoid, such as self-hosting Plausible’s web analytic platform on a shared Docker host).