Publish Owner

Publish on your Own Site…

…Syndicate Everywhere.

Leave it to Cory Doctorow to drop mention^[1] of a content phenomenon that has been haunting my efforts for over a decade. 

Among the most insidious of things that social media does to creators (and that’s a long list) is fool people who write words and make—shudder—content to share online, is to quietly neglect to remind any of us that we lose ownership the second we click the post button on any those sites.

No really.

They’ll pretend like you can edit and curate and delete and archive, but if you post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of a thousand other smaller platforms, they will hand wave around your ownership and rights, but in reality you have few.

I call these places corporate social media for a reason: you are handing over your content not to a community of users but to the corporation that owns the software, server, and algorithms. They can show people what you created if and when they choose, they can censor you, and (as I have witnessed in the outrage rant by many creators over the years who have suffered because of it) they can delete your entire account for vague reasons that they may or may not choose to explain.

We’re not going to change that.

But Doctorow has an acronym for an idea I’ve been screaming from my blogs for years: POSSE or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Or simply, as a creator, it is incumbent upon you to figure out how to make your own central place to keep the things you make—a website, basically—and then syndicate, promote, link, cast, or otherwise surface from there, if for no other reason than you should keep control of ownership of it with every ounce of your digital strength.

This is a cross-post from of Poets & Processors.