The poster’s guide to the new internet

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0:50Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really simple syndication. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the third episode in our series all about connectivity. If you missed the first two episodes, we talked about Tele and how we connect to content, and Beeper and how we connect to each other. They're both super fun episodes. You should listen to both. Today, I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about posting. And when I say posting, I mean it in the broadest possible way. Like, if messaging is how we talk directly to each other, posting is how we talk to the internet, an audience, the whole world, whatever you want to think about.

1:25Posting to threads or X or Instagram, that's posting. Uploading to YouTube or TikTok, also posting. Posting is how a lot of creators have made careers. It's how a lot of people and companies and even governments share and consume information. A huge portion of the internet is just places for posting and for reading other people's posts. One thing we've been talking a lot about on this show over the last year is the way that these posting networks, these social networks, are changing. I really think we're at the end of what you might call the great platform age, where a handful of big companies and products like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and really not that many others own all of the posting systems.

2:07Recently, we have things like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which are big new ideas about how this all works. They're more open, more interconnected, more like the web itself than just a specific platform. We've talked a lot about ActivityPub on this show in the last nine months or so. We're not going to do too much of that today. ActivityPub is the protocol that underlies a lot of the change that's going on. But again, we're not going to do too much of it, just a tiny bit of. Let me just play you this clip from Flipboard CEO Mike McHugh from when he was on The Vergecast back in April. ActivityPub, you know, when I think about it, I think there are two things that it does.

2:45And one of them is to create an open social graph that becomes a part of the web, which in and of itself is a very big deal. The other thing it does is it creates a common two-way streaming platform or architecture that allows services to be interoperable. So what this means is that as we've seen, all these social media platforms basically just become other versions of themselves. They all have vertical video now. They're all copying each other. They all build everything into this vertical stack that's totally proprietary. And if you leave and you try to do a new one. You've got to rebuild your social graph.

3:21As a creator, that's a big issue. As a brand, as a publisher, that's a big problem. So what this reminds me of is the days of AOL, before the web really happened. Everything is built vertically. If you want to put something up online, you have to go do a business development deal with AOL. And all of the innovation is locked in by one company. So they're only doing as much as that one company can do. And with this activity Pub breakthrough, what it really allows is the web to flourish again and to, you know, kind of reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by just, you know, a handful of social media platforms today.

4:01Like I said, we're not going to spend today talking about Activity Pub. I think it's important to understand, but that's not what we're here to do. Today, we are going to talk about an acronym. Sorry, not an acronym. I always get that wrong. It's an initialism. Two of them, actually. Very similar, but also very different in some important ways. The first one is POSSE. P-O-S-S-E. It stands for Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. You don't have to remember that. I'll come back to it. The other one is PESOS. Similar, but different. P-E-S-O-S. It stands for Post Everywhere, Syndicate Own Site. These are two ideas, and really one idea in two parts, about how posting should work.

4:37But they're really not all that different from one another. And I think that if you want to understand the future of posting, Posse and Pesos are the key. So the story of Posse and Pesos starts in about 2012. It came out of a group called IndieWeb, particularly a guy named Tantec Celleck. This is how Tantec described the reason behind the idea at a Google Developers event he was at all the way back in 2013. Because I want to own my own content, I want to control it, but yet I still want to stay in touch with my friends. And that's really where Posse came from, was this like diligent desire to own your own content, but then like, hey, my friends are reading on Twitter or my friends are reading on Facebook or my friends are reading on Google Reader, wherever they're reading, you're like, okay, I have to have a feed, right?

5:18If someone's using a feed reader or if someone's just using Twitter, I need to post copies of my content to Twitter or Facebook. But in all those cases, one thing we've tried to do is like make sure that there's always links or some identifier pointing back to the original. And that's important because when you start kind of forking these conversations in these different forums, you may want to actually integrate them back in your own site. And somebody might want to see like the whole story of what's going on. The idea behind Posse is basically this. Instead of posting by logging into some platform and posting only for that platform and the people on it, then logging into another platform and posting different stuff for that platform and those people, the place you post should be your own website, a blog, social feed, a gallery, whatever.

5:59It should be your website. And that That link back part that Tontek was talking about is also really important. You see some posse believers around the internet, they use full links to their post at the end of every post that they share. Others will add like a six digit ID that you can add to their website URL and find it that way. Either way, the goal is to have your stuff be everywhere, but to always be bringing people back toward your own site. The idea is that a thing is yours that you publish on, and that's where everything starts. The way I think about it is like, who owns the publish button?

6:31Right now, the platforms do. You post on X by typing in a text box on X. You post on Instagram by using Instagram's upload feature. But in a posse world, the publish button lives on your website, your blog, whatever thing you've created. You post there, and whatever you post gets disseminated to all the places that your audience is. I really like this approach. This approach has a bunch of benefits, too, starting with the fact that it's just easier, right? Right now, even if you want to post the exact same thing to X and Threads and Mastodon, you have to log into three services, you do a bunch of copying and pasting, you post in each one individually, you have kind of three different conversations on three different platforms.

7:09It's just disconnected in a way that it shouldn't be. If you've ever used a tool like Hootsuite or Sprinklr or one of those apps that brands use to post their stuff around the web, you know how useful just a simple better posting tool can actually be. Posse would give those tools to everybody. Pesos, by the way, is kind of the exact inverse. In a Pesos world, you can publish from anywhere, using any tools on any platform, and everything you publish gets sent back to your site. So you post on Instagram with Instagram's tools, you post on X with X's tools, but all of it gets pulled back to your website, your blog, whatever it is.

7:42In that world, your website becomes more like an archive of your stuff published elsewhere, whereas Posse sees it as the place for the best version of your posts. That's where people should go to interact with you. The difference is subtle but important, but generally I think both sides really see the world the same way and think that in general, this platform specificity is a bad idea. That's really the bigger picture here. Posse and Pesos both want to totally upend the way we think about our content and social networks. Right now, these social platforms say that you own your content, but you don't, really.

8:15If a social platform goes away, your stuff is just gone. If a platform decides you violated the rules and deletes your stuff, also gone. In the same way that ActivityPub makes your social graph portable between networks, Posse turns the social networks into destinations for your content, but not the place you create anything. I think that difference is really important. And the more I've learned about Posse, the more I've come to see it as a potentially powerful new way to think about posting and building content in general. But it also does raise some really complicated questions. The way we think about posting now, posting is really only half the equation.

8:49So what's Posse's plan for likes and reposts and comments and replies and all the rest of the engagement that comes on these platforms? And if Posse's idea is to just post the same thing on 100 different platforms, is that actually what we want? And just from a pure aesthetic perspective, how does all of that work on one website? How do I make the whole internet of posting in content make sense on my domain? I asked Cory Doctorow, the author and activist and one of the internet's most kind of tenured bloggers, what he thought about all of this. He said that when he set up his new blog, Pluralistic, about two years ago, he tried to adhere to the posse way of life.

9:28And then he explained how his system works. I'm going to play you his entire answer, which is very long and very technical, because I think it's useful to understand what it takes right now to really make this work. I wanted to find a way to stand up a new platform in this moment where everyone gets their news and their, you know, does their reading through these silos that then hold you to ransom. And I wanted to use those silos to bring in readers and to attract and engage with an audience, but I didn't want to become beholden to them. And so I made my own posse thing. And so as when I started, I literally had an HTML template in the default Linux editor, which is called get it, which I've got like Emacs key bindings on.

10:10And I just literally would open that file and resave it with a different file name. Like I'd append the day's date to it and then write a bunch of blog posts in this template. And then I would copy and paste those into Twitter's threading tool and Mastodon and Tumblr and Medium, like one at a time individually editing as I went. And then I would turn it into a text file that I would paste into an email that I would send to a mailman instance where I was hosting a newsletter. And then I had full text RSS as well and discourse for comments, which has its own syndication for people who follow you on discourse.

10:47That was a lot of manual work and I made a lot of mistakes. And a guy, Lauren Kornfield, who's a legendary cryptographer who was following it, took notice of how many manual errors I was making and said, like, do you need me to write you some Python scripts? And so he did. He wrote me a little Python script that automates about three quarters of that work, which still leaves me with substantial work to do. So I have a text editor tab open that has one of the two posts I'm going to post today in it already, and the other one just as a skeleton. And then I have a template file that has all the things that change from day to day, like a recap of yesterday's posts, my overview of my blog posts from 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, 5 years, and 1 year ago, my upcoming talks, and promotional messages.

11:40is I'm running a Kickstarter for my next novel. If I can plug that, it's at lost-cause.org. And so I've got that open. I've got a template open for social media from Mastodon and Twitter that has a slightly different version of those same things that I manually maintain. I have a file called Twitter2 and a file called Mastodon2, which have captures of that second post that I'm going to publish today, but not the first one. There's an empty file called Twitter and Mastodon that are still on my desk. And then in one Firefox window, I have probably about 10 tabs. Three are for Medium, one is for WordPress, three are for Tumblr, three are for Twitter, and three are for Mastodon that are just kind of the templates for these things.

12:20And then in another window, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different tabs for articles that I'm going to refer to in today's blog post. And so I will then compose that in the text editor, run the Python scripts on them. That takes as long as it takes to write a blog post. But then I will spend probably another hour getting everything into all of those feeds. Okay, you get the idea, right? The process is rough. Corey finished his thought here by being very annoyed at how hard it is to post long threads on X these days. And he's right. And here's the problem. The existing platforms, X and all the rest, have no incentive at all to make it easy for you to bring stuff in or get stuff out.

13:03They want to keep you using their tools on their platform as much as possible. But not only are platforms like Blue Sky and Mastodon and Pixel Fed inventing new, more open tools for posting and reading, there are new apps out there trying to posse-ify the internet as we know it now. We're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to talk to the creator of one of them. We'll be right back.

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15:53All right, we're back. I think Posse, as I've been saying, is a really good idea. I really believe in the idea of having your own space and owning your own content online. I'm just not at all sure how it's supposed to work and how it's going to be easier and more doable than just signing up for a Facebook account. So I called up Manton Reese, who's the founder of a service called Micro.blog, to see how he thinks about it. Micro.blog has been around since 2017. It didn't necessarily start as a posse tool or a way to do activity pub posting. It just started because Manton thought, well before Elon Musk showed up, that we needed a Twitter that wasn't owned and operated by one single company.

16:30One of the original premises was just, could we rebuild a Twitter-like user experience, but base it on blogs? So the timeline in micro.blog is just posts from lots of feeds, lots of RSS feeds, whether they're hosted on a micro.blog or they're hosted somewhere else. So how do we merge those together so you don't just have a few tabs open with your favorite websites and you're typing in the domain name? It's more of a news feed timeline experience, and that's what people want. But if the foundation of that, if the protocols can be open, it allows us to build so many interesting apps, so many different types of experiences.

17:06It'll just be way, way better. That philosophy, the stuff he's talking about there, became a lot more real for him, and I think for a lot of people on the internet, over the last year. Frankly, whatever you think about how Elon Musk is doing at X, the whole saga has made really clear that the services we care about and post on are fragile. Micro.blog now lets you keep a simple blog, which kind of looks like Tumblr, I guess, and you can post photos or texts or links or whatever. And when you post to micro.blog, you can also automatically post to Mastodon, Tumblr, BlueSky, Medium, LinkedIn, PixelFed, Noster, and Flickr.

17:41It's a lot of services. One of the big criticisms that I've heard of the Posse approach and of tools like micro.blog is that actually posting the same content to all of those different networks is a terrible idea. Networks have different audiences, different people, different norms, different ways of engaging with the system. At some point, if you're just posting to a bunch of places all at once, aren't you basically spam? When I put that question to Manton, he said he doesn't really see it that way. I think it really depends on the person, like what you're trying to get out of posting. If you are a quote unquote like social media presence and you're an influencer and you are really needing to target different groups, sure.

18:22But if you are posting first for yourself, like I'm doing something, I'm thinking about something, I want to share this with the world, then it's really a secondary decision about how people receive it. So for me, I like to post to my blog. I like everything to be there. And if I post a photo to my blog, it would be great if everybody on different networks could see it. Mandan did agree, though, that the user interface for all of this is bad. Starting at the very beginning, which is that you have to register your own domain. That is already too much work and expense for a lot of people. I mean, who wants to manage DNS records?

18:57Who even wants to know what DNS records are? Micro.blog does push you to register your own domain during the setup process, but Mandan actually said it probably doesn't push hard enough and make it easy enough. And in general, he said the real bar for websites, and for Posse in general, is that you have to be easier than creating a social account. And the thing is, it's really, really easy to create a social account. That's a hard, hard bar to clear. Okay, we've got to take one more quick break, and then I have one more person I want to talk to about all of this. One of the people in charge of the internet's biggest posting platform, and someone who thinks about this stuff way more than most.

19:33We'll be right back.

19:38Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

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22:07All right, we're back. I've become obsessed in recent months with this question of how a Posse system can work. How I, as a poster, can control where all my stuff is, where things go. I can engage with people, but do it all through a place that is mine. It's a really complicated system. It's kind of a rewiring of the entire internet in a certain way. And I think it's going to take everything from domain registrars to RSS readers to social platforms to think totally differently about how they operate if we're going to make this work. And frankly, I've wondered a lot if this is just an impossible dream, a cool idea about the internet of 20 years ago that just can't exist anymore.

22:44Like, is the toothpaste just out of the tube on this stuff now? To help me sort through it, I called up Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automatic and one of the most important people working on WordPress, which is the software that powers basically half the internet. Matt has been a blogger for two decades, and has been working on posting software for pretty much just as long, so I figured he might have some thoughts. And, surprise, surprise, he had some thoughts. The first thing I asked him was if he was familiar with the Posse and Pesos ideas. He said yes, he was, and that he actually liked the theory of it quite a bit.

23:14As someone publishing, I want as much interaction as possible. So why are you making me choose which network it goes to? I should post it once, ideally to my domain, and then it goes to x slash Twitter and threads and Tumblr and all the other networks that can have their own interfaces and network effects and everything like that. but my thoughts should go to all those places. They should all have APIs where whatever interactions are happening on those platforms, I should be able to bring them in. There's actually some really cool plugins for WordPress that'll bring in like Twitter replies to tweets, which I think is kind of interesting.