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[7]On sharing and owning your content

  Posted on Feb 11, 2020 by [8]Horst Gutmann
  Tags: [9]blogging [10]indieweb [11]blogging

  In a recent post [12]Andre Garzia wrote that sharing your content was
  the one big problem that blogging has in 2020. Feed readers, with the
  demise of Google Reader, have gone back to be niche tools, newsletter
  are … newsletters, and most “social networks” are optimised for one
  target audience only: the respective owners of those platforms.

  The current situation facilitates the creation of echo chambers and
  gate keepers with commercial interests that tend to be orthogonal to
  those of the content producers themselves. Let’s say you post your
  content on Twitter (the platform) and that just redirects to your own
  website, then your tweet has potentially less value to Twitter (the
  company) than a tweet that does not redirect the user away from their
  website and over to yours. So it is in the interest of Twitter (the
  company) to show its users posts that don’t do that.

  As bloggers its therefore getting harder and harder to distribute their
  work in a way that leads the readers to the “canonical” location of
  your work (your blog) and also to notify them about new posts.

  I agree with pretty much everything Andre has written on this in his
  post but just want to add a couple of observations:

Content distribution

  I usually share my blog posts through the following channels:
    * In private via something like Slack and [13]Signal with people in
      my close circle who I think might be interested in them.
    * Publicly via Twitter and [14]Mastodon as a general distribution
      channel for people to discover my blog and the posts on it but
      haven’t yet added it to their feed reader.
    * If it’s highly specific to a certain topic, I post it also to the
      respective subreddits.

  One thing to keep in mind, though: As Daniel mentioned on [15]Mastodon,
  most subreddits don’t allow you to “self-promote”. Personally, I
  haven’t had that issue so far but I haven’t posted all that many of my
  posts there yet. What is allowed, though, is that you post your content
  onto your own profile which is also a nice way for people to follow
  your content explicitly (unless it violates some global terms of
  services and code of conduct).

  As I wrote, in general, I haven’t had any issue linking my content on
  these platforms so far. Most of the subreddits that are relevant to my
  interests don’t have strict rules regarding self-promotion as long as
  the content itself is relevant (and not spam). For example [r/golang][]
  does not prohibit linking to your own blog unless it violates the Go
  CoC.

Curated platforms

  One thing that makes Twitter (and Facebook, obviously) different from
  Reddit and Mastodon is that, by default, Twitter might not show users
  the actual timeline but a curated version. This is the level they can
  use to steer users away from content that might not be in the company’s
  best interest (as described in the intro). If your post is not deemed
  “relevant” it might not be shown to your followers.
  [curated-twitter.png] Sometimes Twitter curates, sometimes it
  doesn't...

  This is a big pain and there is not much we can do to get around this
  (unless you consider SEO black-magic to be a valid response here).
  Andrea has the following suggestion:

    So if you enjoy content from bloggers, if there are a couple authors
    that you’re always reading or watching as their content pops up in
    your favorite social network or news aggregator, then do those
    authors a favor and subscribe to their feed.

  I’d go one step further: If you like someone’s content, please link to
  it on whatever platform you’re on, be it Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
  Mastodon, Reddit, whatever.

  In the end, content authors won’t really get around having to also
  promote their content on whatever platform their target audience is on.
  Especially with multimedia focus entities like YouTube, Instagram,
  TikTok, and Byte this is getting harder and harder, though (as some
  even prevent you to properly add links). While word-of-mouth probably
  doesn’t scale, it might be our last resort combined with offering a
  feed users can subscribe to.

  At the same time, we should use every chance to promote channels that
  do allow use to reach our audiences in a reliable way.

Owning is still hard

  Andre also mentions that nowadays it’s actually hard not to start a
  blog. That’s certainly true, but IMO it is still exceedingly difficult
  for a “normal” person to start a blog and own it.

  Sure, you can go to Wordpress.com or other hosts with a paid plan, buy
  a domain and set it up with your host to “own” your blog’s URLs, but
  you still have don’t have an easy path if, for instance, your host is
  legally required to remove your content due to local laws that may or
  may not be relevant for where you are living. And even these initial
  steps to get a blog using your own domain are far from trivial for
  someone who doesn’t work in the tech industry or had otherwise
  experience related to web development.

  These things still have to become far easier in order to make people
  even think if it’s not just more convenient to dump all their content
  into silos like Facebook.

This post was inspired by...

    * [16]Mastodon

  Do you want to give me feedback about this article? Please send it to
  [17][email protected].

  Alternatively, I'm also experimenting with [18]Webmentions. If you
  write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get
  notified about your link 🙂

  [19]Creative Commons License

  (cc) 2003-2020 Horst Gutmann
  If not otherwise stated this work is licensed under a [20]Creative
  Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.
  The source code of this site is available on [21]GitLab. The primary
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References

  1. https://zerokspot.com/index.xml
  2. https://zerokspot.com/
  3. https://zerokspot.com/notes/
  4. https://zerokspot.com/weblog/
  5. https://zerokspot.com/reading/
  6. https://zerokspot.com/mastodon/
  7. https://zerokspot.com/weblog/2020/02/11/sharing-and-owning-content/
  8. https://zerokspot.com/
  9. https://zerokspot.com/tags/blogging
 10. https://zerokspot.com/tags/indieweb
 11. https://zerokspot.com/tags/blogging
 12. https://andregarzia.com/2020/02/the-hard-part-of-blogging-is-not-writing-it-is-sharing-your-post.html
 13. https://www.signal.org/
 14. https://zerokspot.com/mastodon/
 15. https://mastodon.technology/@da/103637721903960027
 16. https://zerokspot.com/mastodon/
 17. mailto:[email protected]
 18. https://webmention.net/
 19. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/
 20. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/
 21. https://gitlab.com/zerok/zerokspot.com
 22. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Liberation-Mono

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