Originally Published Elsewhere

This site has come a long way.

• In its early days, articles have been published on cssence.wordpress.com.
• At some point, there was this brief period where articles have been originally published on medium.com.
• Needless to say, those days are gone. Nowadays, all articles are published on this very site, and there is currently no syndication going on.

Enough about Articles. What about my Notes?

• Since day 1, all notes have been originally published on twitter.com.
• But this changed last year, when I abandoned Twitter and replaced it with Mastodon. Since that change, all notes have been originally published on the mas.to instance.
• It doesn’t end there. Another change just happened, hence this Editorial piece. From now on, all notes are published on this very site, and some syndication will take place.

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Realization

Apparently, three years ago today, I “celebrated” my tenth Twitter anniversary.

In case you are wondering, I did not delete my Twitter account. While I haven’t added new content since I’ve moved to Mastodon, I’m holding on to the account to keep the old content and its URLs alive, even though I have a copy of everything on my site anyhow.

A while back I’ve read Andy Bell realized Mastodon is giving him the ick:

I really started to miss people who never came over to Mastodon.

I can relate. Thanks to a recent Twitter visit, I’ve learned that I am missing out on a lot of stuff that is posted exclusively over there. By that I don’t mean the chitchat, but links to new articles written by people I follow. Sure, there are other ways to find out about them, though sadly I’m not riding the RSS train (yet). And yes, some of said links make their way to Mastodon too, a number of people even post on both platforms, but more often it is either-or.

Now what? Crawling back to a platform that is in an ongoing state of turmoil? Not according to Jeremy Keith, who mentioned in his article named »The syndicate«:

Twitter is dead to me (and it should be dead to you too).

As luck would have it, Twitter has just died for everybody. No, wait, they are rebranding it to X.com as I write this.

If the bird site dies, and comes back as X, did it phoeniX? 🤦

This just got real fast, my 13th anniversary may be my last.

Back to the actual topic. The thing is, I’ve always been very passive when it comes to social media, but I do use social media as a comment system for my blog. Being on more than one platform grows my potential audience.

Course Correction

Before my latest change, I wrote a note on the third-party platform, and pulled it back into my site.

The new course of action is to publish a note on my own site first, and then syndicate it elsewhere. This was bound to happen, because my notes are the last remaining area where I didn’t adhere to the #IndieWeb POSSE principle.

Doing this has led to a number of changes:

1. Now that I’m no longer fetching notes from a remote source and using POSSE instead, I’m not limited to just one platform, I can syndicate to as many as I see fit.
2. And you may have already guessed it, I’ve decided to syndicate to Mastodon and Twitter/X.
3. Additionally, I’ve decided to remove all links to my tweets and toots from my site, past and present. Only the links to other people’s tweets and toots remain untouched. This also means …
4. …, paradoxically, now that I’m using Twitter again X for the first time, I’m less attached to it. Should the need arise, pulling the plug on them is simpler than ever before.
5. The character limit for my notes is gone, although I will continue to keep them short. Syndicated notes might end up being truncated, with a link at the end to the true source, where you can read them in full.

As it happens, at the time of writing this article, I have not posted a single note this year. But I use this for regular articles too. I obviously cannot syndicate the complete content, but I do share a link, to make new articles discoverable. This Editorial article is the first to be announced on both Mastodon and Twitter/X.

The Road Ahead

Social networks come and social networks go.

Having quoted Jeremy again, I’ll admit that the situation over at Twitter/X is an insurmountable problem, and my decision to even give them a slight bit of my attention may be questionable. At the same time, with my latest changes in place, I personally feel well prepared for what may lie ahead. I can turn syndication on, and maybe even more importantly, I can turn syndication off.