Self Publish, Syndicate Out. For the AI Era.

Known as "POSSE" on the Indieweb ("Publish own site, syndicate everywhere"), the concept of having your own website to distribute the things you write and talk about is an old one. The once ubiquitous language "PHP" originally stood for "personal home page". The concept goes that self publishing on your own site establishes permalinks that give attribution and ownership to the author, not a platform.

That's all well and good but there's a reason platforms exist - the critical mass of eyeballs that they have attracted make two things really easy: publishing and discovery. You need to put something that you created on the internet with the least friction as possible, and someone else hopefully wants to find and consume what you created. Platforms have done a really good job of establishing moats to protect themselves, such a good job that providing a nice experience for their users isn't really all that important; e.g. Facebook can allow a mass amount of slop in your feed because your grandma is already there and your small rural town gossip lives and dies by a Facebook group. Meta itself freely admits they make a ton of money on scams - perhaps as much as 10%, which represents about $7 billion. Personally, I don't much buy the perspective that corporations are evil - they are more like a huge boat that takes thousands of people to crew and a primary goal of staying afloat (making money), regardless of whatever the captain says it still takes thousands of people working together to change directions and they still prioritize making money regardless, it's just a big dumb ship trying not to sink. In that context, no surprise here that Facebook is a slop fest and Twitter is a goblin posting dumpster fire.

So no surprise that current platforms are a mess but what can anyone do about it? These things are dominant due to network effects right?

Well that's where things might get interesting in the AI era. Agents are quickly becoming the number one user of the internet — software documentation these days are primarily serving agent traffic even. In a world where content is consumed and distributed via autonomous agents, the discovery mechanism of large platforms becomes much less valuable. If agents are pushing users towards content instead of the platforms themselves, then the network value of a platform is greatly diminished and then what's left? Oh its super easy to publish on? Well geez, it's super easy to have Claude go make a website (e.g. like this one), why send my readers to an ad-tech hell hole at all?