The Vergecast - The poster’s guide to the new internet

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

In episode three of our connectivity mini series, The Verge's David Pierce explores the idea of POSSE and PESOS, two syndication models for posting on the internet that don't rely on a single platform. Buckle in, it gets nerdy. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome 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 miss the first two episodes, we talked about telly 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. Posting the 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. Recently, we have things like Macedon 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 Activity Pub on this show in the last nine months or so.

We're not going to do too much of that today. Activity Pub 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. activity pub, you know, when I think about it, I think there are two things that it does. And 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. As 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 kind of reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by just a handful of social media platforms today. Like 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-O-S-Site-E. It stands for Post-O-Site-E-Side-E-E-S-E. 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-S-E. It stands for Post-E-E-E-W-S-E-E-S-E. These are two ideas, and really one idea in two parts about how posting should work. But they're really not all that different from one another. And I think that if you want to understand the future of posting, Pasi 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 Chelek. This is how Tontek described the reason behind the idea at a Google developer's 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 feed, right, if 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. Yeah. 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. It should be your website. And that link back part that talks about, that's

Cont Tech 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? Right 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 a copying and pasting, you post in each one individually, you have kind of three different conversations on three different platforms. It's just disconnected in a way that it shouldn't be. If you've ever used a tool like Hootsweet or Sprinkler 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. POSSI 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. In 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. Pasi 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. If 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 Activity Pub 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.

So 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 Docterot, 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. And 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 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 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. And I just literally would

open that file and re-save 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 to follow you on discourse. That was a lot of manual work, and I made a lot of mistakes. And a guy Lauren Cormfield, 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'm, 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, five years, and one year ago, my upcoming talks and promotional messages, 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 Twitter 2 and a file called Mastodon 2, 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 or for medium. One is for WordPress, three or for Tumblr, three or for Twitter, and three or for Mastodon. that are just kind of the templates for these things. And 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. They 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 posseify 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.

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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.com blog to see how he thinks about it. micro.comlog 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. One of the original premises was just, could we rebuild a Twitter-like user experience

but based on blogs. So the timeline in micro.com blog is just posts from lots of feeds, lots of RSS feeds, whether they're hosting a microdop blog or they're hosted somewhere else. So how do we merge those together so you don't just have like 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 just build so many interesting apps, so many different types of experiences. It'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.comlog 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.comlog, you can also automatically post to Mastodon, Tumblr, Blue Sky, Medium, LinkedIn, pixel fed, Noster, and Flickr. It's a lot of services. One of the big criticisms that I've heard of the Posse approach and of tools like micro. dot 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, 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. But 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.

Manden 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? Who even wants to know what DNS records are? micro. dot blog does push you to register your own domain during the setup process, but Manson 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. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online

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Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All 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 do 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. Like, 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. As 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 have, 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. And then as well, if I'm interacting with someone else with their own domain, their own open web thing, like, there should be a way for our sites to talk to each other in a way that has the same effect as what's sort of simple to do in these monolithic domain architectures. This is really curious how you think about it as not somebody who runs one of these companies, but who has been a blogger on the internet for a really long time. Because I think the counter that I've heard to the posse idea is that it's just not true that you can post one thing and syndicate it everywhere and it will

work. That fundamentally, even all the networks are just text boxes or a vertical video, but they want different things. They have different norms. And you actually have to kind of be different things in different places because that's just how these systems work. Is that a surmountable thing in the kind of posse era? What do you make of that criticism of the thesis? Yeah, I mean, there's nuance to each one, of course. And there's, like, public companies, like, sprinkler or sprout that all they do is, like, allow folks who want to post all these places, like, manage that.

We've been thinking in our Jetpack plugin as well. I've been thinking a lot about what's the right UI for this. I think there might be something, like, the first step is posting to my blog. And the second step is I kind of get some opportunities to customize it for each network, Versus I think where we messed up a little bit is by trying to make this all automated, which by definition maybe loses some of the nuance of like cropping the image a certain way or maybe even not having a link. Maybe you don't link back to your post, which you just sort of associate the ID of a tweet

with a canonical post on your side. And then you kind of figure it out on your side versus trying to have them link back to you. So I think this is actually more of a user interface and user flow issue than it is necessarily a technical one. I'm really into this kind of two or three step publishing process as part of this, as a way to get around this. The other nice thing is that you want to aggregate as well. So I don't want to have to go to all these places necessarily to find the people who I

really care about following. Maybe I'll open an app to see what their flavor of algorithm is and if it services anything interesting for me. But for people I truly want to follow, I kind of want something that brings that all together in a way that, again, as someone who runs a network like Tumblr, like I know this is like a tradeoff because I want people obviously to come to my thing so I can show ads and support the service and everything. But as a user, I really want everything together and one. Yeah, I think that's right. I think part of why I'm so excited about this whole next phase is that like the creating the platform and the consumption can all be different things. They can all be the same

thing in the same place, but they can also be all different things in different places. And there's just a whole bunch of fascinating products that are going to appear when you can just be a reading app. Like the folks at Flipboard, I know, are thinking a lot about this stuff. They're like, how do we make the best reading experience for the Fediverse? We don't even have to worry about the text boxes to post in. We just want to figure out consumption. And I think splitting up that stuff is so interesting. There's a few jobs to be done when you think about it. Like, and the apps bundle them into one thing because papers used to bundle like classified and obituaries and news. and journalists and lifestyle stuff.

What they do is they bundle, like, I'm bored, and I want to see something from people I follow. I'm bored, and I want to see things that maybe I don't know I want, which is actually where they've scaled a lot. I want to publish something. And then finally, like, I want to see how people are interacting with the thing I published. I guess maybe a fifth, I want to reply to things that people published

or share things that people published. That's a really lovely loop. And actually, one of the things I miss most about kind of the reader date, is like how much it would get me to blog. Because when I was kind of one click, or I used the WordPress bookmark clip, you know, I could be on any site reading any article. And it was just one click to kind of share that to my blog.

But at some point, I think especially with WordPress making the title so prominent, like we made it a little too heavy to do a post. And I want something a little bit more like Kotkey or Daring Fireball or like some of these longstanding blogs. And how I've been trying to redesign my blog, MA.it. It's to also have these titleless posts, which are a little just low.

Or, you know, the big title and the big image really makes you feel like you got to write like an essay. Got to do something like you post where it's like really thought through and has lots of, but sometimes I just want to shoot something off a little shorter. It's not really a tweet because I want to have links and like I want to be rich, but it's, it's not like a essay either. It's not, you know, one of these magnum opuses that Mark and Driezer program posts. I've been researching this stuff and talking to people about it for months now. And here's what I think. I think this is the way.

I think it's a shame that we've all gotten used to giving away all of our. our posts and all of our content just to get the engagement and connection that we get from these platforms. I think it is possible to have it both ways. And I think a posse style system is a really cool way to get there. Just as I'm hopeful that Activity Pub is going to win and open up social to many more platforms and systems and ways of thinking about the world, I'm hopeful that Posse can win too because I think we shouldn't be stuck on platforms and more of the internet should belong to

us and not companies. And there are some really exciting signs here. I think the thing Blue Sky is doing where you can use your domain name as your username is awesome. A bunch of people I talk to mention that to me as one sign of doing this exactly the right way. I also think tools like Mycor.com blog are a big deal. And I think the growth of these new platforms like Blue Sky and Macedon can also bring new growth, not just in how we post, but in how we consume posts and how we sort them and how we organize them. All of this is being broken into pieces in really interesting ways.

I also think it might just be impossible to pull all of this off. The truth is we do live in an era of walled gardens, where the biggest businesses in the world have figured out how to keep us and our posts glued to their feed and addicted to their publish buttons. For Posse to work, will basically take a complete reinvention of the internet. From the blogging software to the social networks to like literally the GoDaddy interface, all of it is going to have to change in order for this to work in big, meaningful internet shaping ways.

If all of that does happen, and again, I'm hopeful but skeptical that it will happen. It won't happen fast or soon. Even in 2012, when the IndieWeb community was first talking about POSSI, the web was a more open and less commercialized place than it is now. Now, I mean, you know what it's like to be online. It's just commerce everywhere. So stay tuned on Posse and Pesos, but here is my one piece of very specific advice for right now. Buy a domain name.

If you don't already have one, buy one that feels like it could be your internet home. Your username, your blog, your archive, your publish button, your everything. Personally, I bought Davidpeerce.x, y'y-Z a while ago for this exact purpose. But I'm looking at it now and I could be David pierced dot social, David pierce dot guitars, David pierce dot bingo, which actually rules, David pierce dot golf, David pierced dot apartments and so many other things. Get a domain and get ready for the future when that domain is like your phone number or your email address or your username, that it is the signal of the part of the internet that actually belongs to you. I don't know how long it's going to take for it to be like that, but I think

it's going to be great. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you so much to everyone who is on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with episodes on Wednesday and Friday. There's still tons of news to cover this week, from yet another Netflix price hike to Cybertruck ship dates to Mario games and lots more. And then we'll be back next Monday with the fourth and final episode in our connectivity series. See you then. Rock and Roll.