We need a social media POSSE

On my newsletter course this morning, the proliferation of social media platforms came up. We were talking about ways of growing your newsletter’s audience, and how some of the old approaches are breaking down as the social platforms people use shift. In particular, with Melon Husk’s X-ified Twitter clearly losing both activity and relevance, people are having to look to other platforms to reach the people they want to interact with. And that’s only getting harder as the number of platforms grows.

As Molly White put it in her Citation Needed newsletter:

When I started using Mastodon in addition to Twitter, it felt manageable. I could reasonably copy-and-paste my posts across two platforms, even if it was a bit of a pain. Two browser tabs and two apps on my phone felt doable. When I added Bluesky on top of it, it no longer felt manageable. Posting a multi-post thread with photos and alt text became a tedious chore, especially with variations in character limits and other functionality. But I didn’t really want to leave any of these platforms entirely, because each was home to occasionally but not entirely overlapping groups.

Unless you’re in the blessed situation that all your core audience have settled on a single platform, you need to find a way to post to multiple platforms in a time-efficient way. Thankfully, people have been thinking about this for years — and there’s a useful concept that’s come out of the IndieWeb world: POSSE.

Bring on the POSSE

Molly White again:

The short-term solution to these problems is a little-known acronym called POSSE. Short for Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere, it’s not a protocol or even a piece of software, but rather a philosophy. Rather than publishing a post onto someone else’s servers on Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky or Threads or whichever microblogging service will inevitably come along next, the posts are published locally to a service you control. At that point, the rest is simple (if not easy): plugging in whichever social media sites you desire, and syndicating the posts through them either by copying the post there directly, or publishing a snippet with a link back to the original source.

And, of course, when one site dies, you just unplug it — but still have the core activity in your own system, as an archive.

Now, if you’re working as part of an audience team, this will sound familiar. You’re probably already using social media management software that facilitates cross-posting to multiple services. Most of the big providers are steadily adding the emergent social media services as they appear. However, that’s not really POSSE: more SE. It’s just syndicating everywhere, without having a “home base”, an original source of the posts.

And what of the rest of us, this who can’t afford a social media management platform for our day-to-day activities? What about the individual journalist who wants to get POSSE on their social media activity?

POSSE for one

I’m already using a variation of this. Most of my social media activity on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr is being posted via Micro.blog. I publish to my account there, and it syndicates it to those services. I could also add Tumblr and LinkedIn if I wanted. Where possible, the service also pulls replies back into Micro.blog from their original service. And, of course, all my original posts still live on my own site.

In the long term, the ActivityPub protocol might make all of this easier and smoother. But it’s still very much under development (but don’t worry, the ActivityPugs are on the case — and, yes, I’ll explain that reference in a later post, just in case what lies on the other end of that link makes no sense to you at all).

We’re moving into a world of online community diaspora and multiple social platforms, with overlapping membership. We need our publishing plumbing to catch-up, and it will. But it’ll be a rough few years while it does so.

No sale, no publish

Ian Betteridge on the closure of two Future websites, iMore and AnandTech:

I’m not surprised – while both sites were well regarded, they were not a great fit for the affiliate-led strategy that Future has been pursuing for many years (where it was ahead of most publishers).

A future where the only websites that survive are ones that can persuade you to buy shit via them is not a particularly attractive one to me…

Is text-based social media done?

David Allen Green predicts the growing irrelevance of text-based social media like X (former known as Twiblahblahblah):

There will still be a place for text-based social media, just like there are those who persist with CB Radio. But it was just a phase we were going through.

However…

People have been comparing the internet to CB Radio since it began. It was a fad, just like CB Radio, or so people used to say, dismissively. So, much as I agree with David’s overall piece, I think text-based social media (and, indeed, blogging/newslettering) will remain much bigger than CB Radio did — but will perhaps never anywhere near as mainstream as it has been.

And that’s OK. As a former B2B journalist, I know there’s so much amazing work you can do with smaller, more loyal and more engaged audiences.

That said, you really need to brush up on your video skills, if you want to stay relevant as a publication.

A tool to try: NotebookLM

NotebookLM is an experimental tool from Google that allows you to upload a set of information — like documents or a website — and then use a chat interface to interrogate them. The use in journalism research is obvious. And it’s surprisingly good, in my experiments, and other people are having similar experiences.

Peter Bihr is very impressed:

I tested NotebookLM a bit over the last few days and must say it struck me as really quite capable and useful. Among other things, once I let it ingest my whole website including 20+ years of blog archives and found it answered questions well and without any hallucinations I noticed.

And Matt Birchler asked it to make a podcast to summarise his entire site:

Another thing they just released is the ability to generate a "podcast episode" about the things you've uploaded. The audio is very convincing, and while the content is a little vague and imprecise in the way AI-generated text often is, I was very curious to hear what that podcast would contain if I fed it the 3,972 blog posts from this site. Basically, if you took everything I've ever published to this site, what would be your biggest takeaways?

Have a listen, and see what you think…

Here’s how to make your own version. And, yes, obviously I couldn’t resist. Here’s the podcast it made about OM&HB:

A podcast about OM&HB

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And this is how it summarises the 21 years of this blog in text form:

"One Man & His Blog" is a blog written by Adam Tinworth, a journalist and lecturer, focused on the evolving media landscape. Tinworth's blog posts explore various topics related to journalism and technology, including the use of artificial intelligence, the shift in news consumption, and the challenges of advertising in the digital age. Tinworth also discusses the impact of emerging technologies on newsrooms and the potential for AI to both benefit and threaten the future of journalism.

Fun stuff. But is it reliable enough to use in actual research? We’ll need to test it some more to be certain.