… also overhauled my #POSSE publishing chain, thanks to thinking about it through the #socialspec lens.
If the big idea is that our individual websites are the basis of our social identity on the web, then I was getting it wrong with my previous approach, which treated all my internet presences as coequal: Mastodon, Bluesky, website, Pixelfed, all pointing at each other and nowhere.
So I’m thinking in terms of my website being “home.” To do that, it now keeps a record of everything I post everywhere:
- Post to Pixelfed, boosted to Mastodon, posted on my site
- Post to Mastodon from Ivory, also posted on my site
- Plain old posts, syndicated to Mastodon and Bluesky
I avoided thinking in terms of my site as a home I’d want to attract people to because I was forced to think that way when I worked in commercial online media: We were pushed to barge out into the social web and try to grab attention.
But a difference of opinion with a sort of major dude on the social web scene a few years ago has stuck with me:
I asked him to support hashtags in micro.blog and he was resistant for a variety of reasons, but wanted to know why I wanted them. I said it was about discoverability. He wanted to know “why is it so important to be discovered?”
Which, it’s why I’m bothering doing any of this. I want to interact with people online! To do that, they have to find me! Hashtags are a way for them to find me in a fairly non-pushy, non-obtrusive way: If I add a few to a post, and someone is using their platform’s hashtag discovery tools, maybe they’ll find what I had to say about something and I can make a new friend.
… and carrying that thought through, I am okay with saying “hello" at a conversational volume, and also saying, “this is my home over here. If you’d like to get to know me, it’s the probably the best place to do that.”
