POSSE

Platforms can amplify your voice, certainly. However, publishing directly on them as a medium also changes the way you approach writing. 

A platform incentivizes you to think of what your work can do for you; true creative work requires you to consider what you can do for your work—and for other people.

It’s a platform’s business to continue shifting, and to try to test new models for how it shows readers content. Your work may be an occasional beneficiary of that; though most of the time, I’ve found the opposite to be true—your work gets more commoditized and less relevant to a platform, which is eager to share more popular posts or to give new users their moment.

Your job as a creator is to keep creating. Platforms are becoming worse and worse surfaces to enjoy the creative process.

The solution is to publish at your own website again, and then to post the content from your own site to the platforms. IndieWeb put together a nice acronym for this approach, “POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”

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