I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums.
But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.
Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.
If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.
I follow this approach. It's mostly because I want to own the land I build on.
It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort.
It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.
That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE
Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
I like when I read something, and it has links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc. Most blogs don't have a very active comment field, and if I'm reading it a few days late, it's nice to still be able to find other's thoughts on the matter.
> links to the "main" discussion on HN/reddit/etc.
I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web.
There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.
I don't post stuff on a blog, but I do have replies to common arguments written down in Obsidian. I can just copy stuff from there, edit a bit and post.
However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed.
It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g.
1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel)
2. DCS adds domain to those topics
3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed)
You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals.
e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff
Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.
Nice that we have a name now for something that's pretty much standard and common practice. Not that we necessarily needed a name, but it's still nice to have one.
> something that's pretty much standard and common practice
Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
The idea is not that you necessarily write a Twitter-length post on your website - you can write a full blog post, but then post links back to that post on social media.
Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468600 - Jan 2026 (248 comments)
POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636052 - April 2023 (70 comments)
POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696 - Nov 2021 (43 comments)
Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16663850 - March 2018 (26 comments)
But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.
Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.
If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
It works well, but it's hard to automate. In the end you must manually cross-post, and both the post and the discussion will vary by community. You end up being active in multiple different communities and still getting little traffic from the effort.
It's not such a great way to drive traffic. On the other hand, it's a wonderful way to work in public.
That's because social media sites have purposefully made it hard (or relatively expensive) to post on their platforms with automated tools - they specifically don't want you to POSSE
Facebook also deprioritises posts with links in them to disincentivize people using their platform to promote their own primary source, that's why there's the "link in comments" crap.
1. I like your blog and subscribe to its RSS
2. I see new posts in my RSS reader with syndication links to (HN/reddit/twitter/etc).
3. I can go to those places to talk about it.
Low tech version is just linking to those discussions at the bottom of your post I guess.
I don't mean to pick on your comment specifically, but it's saddening to see how after these years of the "appification" of the internet and corporations successfully conditioning us to think of terms of their walled gardens, we lost the web.
There shouldn't be a "main" discussion. Our browsers should be able to find these links and present the information in a way that it makes sense to consumer, not the publisher. This gets deeply frustrating for me now that I am working more on ActivityPub and Linked Data. Most of the AP projects are so focused on emulating the closed gardens, they don't even think about building their systems with linking as the primary discovery method.
However I am not sure about "perma-shortlinks", for discovery on other sites as the means of networking and discovering content. It seems clunky to maintain as it requires a human or some automation to curate/maintain the links. If a blog removes a link to another blog, then that pathway is closed.
It would be cool if we could solve that with a "DNS for tags/topics" a - Domain Content Server (DCS) e.g.
1. tomaytotomato.com ==> publishes to the DCS of topics (tech, java, travel)
2. DCS adds domain to those topics
3. Rating or evaluating of the content on website based on those tags (not sure the mechanics here, but it could be exploited or gamed)
You could have several DCS for topics servers run by organisations or individuals.
e.g. the Lobsters DNS for topics server would be really fussy about #tech or #computerscience blog posts, and would self select for more high brow stuff
Meanwhile a more casual tech group would score content higher for Youtube content or Toms Hardware articles.
This is just spit balling.
The whole point of syndication is that it's curated by humans (you, if it's your own feed).
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160904131420/https://indieweb....
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol
Is it? How many people publish to their sites small texts that they then syndicate to Twitter/Bluesky/whatever? How many people publish videos to their sites and then syndicate to Youtube?
The idea is about 10 years old. At least that's when I first heard about it, with relation to RSS. It may go back earlier.
Edit: confirmed by the "See Also" section at the end of TFA.