Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found itin my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters exist and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise. I guess this makes sense—hard to monetize views through an RSS reader
The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ
There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.
Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.
There is a balance to be struck though. Microblogging services like Mastodon make it extremely easy to publish short posts with very low friction. That low friction helps people write more. Whether that's a good thing or bad lies in the eyes of the beholder. If publishing on your own website has higher friction than posting to something like Mastodon, then following POSSE too strictly can end up discouraging you from publishing at all.
Personally, I follow POSSE to a large extent (although I didn't know this term until recently; it is essentially how personal websites and sharing worked in the early 2000s). But I also post freely to microblogging services like Mastodon on instances run by someone else, without worrying too much about POSSE. Occasionally, a microblog post grows into something that needs more than a paragraph. When that happens, I turn it into a proper blog post on my own website and then share it back out.
If you run your own Mastodon instance, as many people do, there is a bit of an overlap between publishing on your own site (POS) and syndicating elsewhere (SE), since one of the places you are syndicating to lives on your own website. I do not do this myself, as I prefer to keep my hobby infrastructure simple: no heavy services, just Nginx serving static HTMLs as my POS and someone else's Mastodon instance for SE.
This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.
You can have both! POSSE to post multiple places. PESOS to pull in anything posted directly in other places, i.e. anything that didn't originate from a POSSE post.
I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around api usage and automation can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
Havent been able to figure this out for Instagram - also the only social media that is still relevant for me.
(thankfully?) never got into twitter where it seems to be easy.
I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually.
If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...
It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.
I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one to talk to at all about many things.
Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found itin my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters exist and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise. I guess this makes sense—hard to monetize views through an RSS reader
The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
Hell yeah! Just subscribed.
I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.
Maybe a dumb question but why?
Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ
There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.
It is kind of fun even if it serves no purpose. Like those end of year recaps by various services, "oh shit I played that much Hades?"
Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.
There is a balance to be struck though. Microblogging services like Mastodon make it extremely easy to publish short posts with very low friction. That low friction helps people write more. Whether that's a good thing or bad lies in the eyes of the beholder. If publishing on your own website has higher friction than posting to something like Mastodon, then following POSSE too strictly can end up discouraging you from publishing at all.
Personally, I follow POSSE to a large extent (although I didn't know this term until recently; it is essentially how personal websites and sharing worked in the early 2000s). But I also post freely to microblogging services like Mastodon on instances run by someone else, without worrying too much about POSSE. Occasionally, a microblog post grows into something that needs more than a paragraph. When that happens, I turn it into a proper blog post on my own website and then share it back out.
If you run your own Mastodon instance, as many people do, there is a bit of an overlap between publishing on your own site (POS) and syndicating elsewhere (SE), since one of the places you are syndicating to lives on your own website. I do not do this myself, as I prefer to keep my hobby infrastructure simple: no heavy services, just Nginx serving static HTMLs as my POS and someone else's Mastodon instance for SE.
This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
superficially it makes me very happy that both strategies make very cute acronyms
POSSE offers a single source of truth the owner owns, vs PESOS which has multiple source of truth not owned by the owner if it's an external site.
You can have both! POSSE to post multiple places. PESOS to pull in anything posted directly in other places, i.e. anything that didn't originate from a POSSE post.
I don't do any syndication so my self-published site is simply a POS :'(
Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:
https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
Just discovered https://posseparty.com/ to ease your cross-posting.
I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around api usage and automation can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
How does Buffer[0] operate then? Even an open-source alternative to Buffer, Postiz[1], offers Instagram.
0. https://buffer.com
1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app
Havent been able to figure this out for Instagram - also the only social media that is still relevant for me. (thankfully?) never got into twitter where it seems to be easy.
I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually. If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...
I still feel RSS was the pinnacle. Of course it’s a personal preference, but I much prefer letting people pull my content than pushing it onto them.
You can tell it's a good idea because Facebook and other "big enough to crush instead of cooperate" media sites down-rank you for doing it
It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
Awesome initiative. Will delve into this. It's how the web should be.
Related:
Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055
A website to destroy all websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784
Someone recommended Posse Party in a now deleted comment, but beware its (ambiguous and poorly written, if you ask me) noncommercial license:
https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
If only HN had been doing this almost since it's inception. Oh wait.
POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.
I read this as an ownership issue, where Meta owns your content as long as you post on Facebook or Instagram, and has nothing to do with LLMs.
Meta and all the other AI companies think they own it even when it’s on your site.
I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one to talk to at all about many things.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater