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Emily Gertenbach

Emily Gertenbach

Thoughts on SEO, AI, data privacy, books, and breaking up with big tech

Build With Me: POSSE Plan

Longform Building in Public
Bluesky

Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere, or POSSE, is an indie web principle that helps you retain control over your own content. Unsurprisingly, as I’ve been building Tiredof.Tech, owning my own content is very important to me.

My SEO writing and consulting business website is built on Ghost, and this site uses Micro.blog—both federated platforms. (I’ll be adding micro.blogs as subdomains to Tiredof.Tech and my sci-fi book list soon as well).

Because Ghost and Micro.blog work with the fediverse, people can find my content from one platform on the other (or on another fediverse site like Mastodon) without creating new accounts.

But not everyone is plugged into the fediverse—it’s confusing! I’ve been dancing around the edge of it for years and it’s just now finally really making sense to me.

Luckily, because you own your own content when using the fediverse, I can easily share what I write out to closed platforms, too. But my content didn’t originate on those proprietary sites—if one shuts down, my content lives on.

My POSSE plan is as follows:

  1. Write all of my content using my beloved Ulysses app, which I’ve used for years.
  2. Publish content directly to the correct Ghost or micro.blog site through Ulysses’ publishing integrations.
  3. My consulting site and articles from this personal domain get automatically pushed out to LinkedIn.
  4. Every site’s content gets automatically pushed to its correct Bluesky feed—again, stuff I’ve preconfigured and was posting to manually before.
  5. My business site, Tiredof.Tech, and book blog Bluesky feeds appear as Tweet-style microposts on emilygertenbach.com, meaning that everything I write can be found when someone searches for me by name. It’ll link out to the original publication site, too, so I won’t be self-competing for SEO.

All of that is supposed to happen automatically based on settings I’ve preconfigured in micro.blog using direct site connections and RSS feeds.

I will then manually post select content to Medium and Tailwind (a Pinterest posting tool).

Whether it works as expected or not, any future learnings I get out of setting up this POSSE process can be found here…or on Bluesky…or on LinkedIn…or on Medium…or wherever you read your content going forward.

Once I get it working, of course!