Startin’ up a POSSE

Owning one’s identity, online or otherwise, is a fundamental responsibility. It is a core tenet of individual liberty and the capacity to respond to any challenge on one’s own terms. Free from the influence of censorious agents who would silence or sway opinion to insidious ends.

Connections made with others still matter, absolutely. Even as prisoners in the walled gardens of convenience, we are social animals and thrive on like-minded interaction. Yet we must demand the right to choose how we interact, through the constructed idioms of whatever culture we embrace. There is no ‘one size fits all’ muzzle, and we must not be compelled to phrase our words carefully for fear of external erasure.

Repeated attempts were made last year to sabotage my social presence. Although ultimately futile, these attacks deliberately targeted time-critical announcements. Weaponising an already-opaque appeals process to silence me at crucial moments, with intent to expunge everything.

Separate from this circumstance, friends’ fringe fashion, design, and dance profiles have weathered similar storms. With innocuous posts and stories reported for nebulous (and often misogynistic) reasons, harming their legitimate businesses.

Behind the cowardly cloak of anonymity, there is no objective difference between malign mischief and corporate diktat. Those who spam such reports remain anarcho-statist bootlickers of the lowest order.

Nonetheless, I found a way through – with a little inspiration from other digital dissidents pushing back against such trite totalitarianism.

The IndieWeb movement embodies this defiance with a people-first philosophy. Advocating the return of personal data to independent self-ownership, the use of open standards to share one’s web presence, and the freedom to be individually unique and creative about it.

It is that determination I choose to carry forward by example: Sharing experiences and solutions for those who have been similarly targeted, but with a greater intent to empower all.

Liberty does not cease at the inflection point of ire.

Despite the authoritarian overreach of SocMed, detaching does not necessarily mean deletion. Even those who have no desire to play the game have to sustain some form of online presence or become disconnected. Especially so if their business needs to be known.

Private chats, mailing lists, and semi-public forums still exist, of course. Authors can publish on sites that specialise in long-form screeds. Countless websites and blogs exist in independent isolation, covering an infinity of interests.

Discoverability is the determining factor. Chats, often hidden behind new app protocols, lack visibility or permanence. Independent websites with something original to say are deprioritised in search engine results, lost in a morass of AI-generated pseudo-sites and duplicated drivel.

Hosting content away from one’s control runs afoul of silencing concerns. The administrators of third party sites, or worse, volunteer moderators, will always push their own agenda. Abdicating responsibility to others binds one to their intractable whims, necessitating thorny topics be hidden behind cute phrasing to get past ham-fisted word filters.

And none of this provides a unified presence, an arguable advantage of centralisation.

The goal, then, is to regain ownership of one’s online identity, with freedom to write unfettered while sustaining the authentic connections made along the way. A challenge faced by the IndieWeb community, whose principles propose a way to take things back.

And it starts by claiming one’s domain.

The HeathenStorm website had been plodding along for years in various stages of development. Starting off as a placeholder page for the production business, it slowly expanded to cover my various creative projects. The main feature of the site was a series of portal pages for the tours I brought into the country – hosting news updates and band bios alongside ticket and event links. Nonetheless, most of my updates remained on SocMed, with the website an overall afterthought.

Truth is a subjective concept, provoking conflict between those who believe their differing interpretations absolute. In the specific context of distributed publishing, a “Single Source of Truth” refers to a central location holding the most current and consistent version of data, no matter where else it may be duplicated.

I had diluted my truth, smearing it across SocMed sites and exposing it to expunction – so I turned to the IndieWeb practice of POSSE to reclaim it.

Meaning ‘Publish (on) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere’, this simple principle flipped everything around. Instead of scrawling scraps that risk censure to appease a disconnected, divided audience, I would simply write for myself on my website. Canonically consolidating my online presence secured the source of truth, providing proof of identity away from unreliable platforms and malicious actors. Anything of worth would be posted there first, then syndicated to SocMed as required.

That’s all it took to return business to normal, but it’s still just the beginning. My website posts have become more authentic and personal as result of this refocus, and that’s the voice I wish to project.

I’ve barely posted directly to SocMed in the past months but still retain the accounts. Not just for syndication, but also as a backup point of contact should the site have technical problems. Where friends are unavailable elsewhere, I sustain connections with comments, direct messages, and an abundance of emoji. But I no longer permit myself to be drained by it all.

The encouraging thing about IndieWeb is that it’s presented as a series of incremental improvements. It’s not an all-or-nothing replacement and it’s possible to expand in parallel. There are many options to further increase connectivity, such as Webmentions and Microformats, which I can investigate and implement in due course.

Syndication is a manual process for now. I duplicate these posts on Instagram, which (eventually) feeds into Facebook. Although there are ways to automate this, Instagram’s caption limits are painfully tight – requiring a lot of pasting into comments which then have to be reassembled on FB – so it’s best to do it by hand.

I have options here. I can continue to syndicate the full text of my posts or just publish an excerpt with a link back to the original. As Instagram doesn’t make links clickable, full syndication offers less friction to the reader.

Although there are other SocMed sites to syndicate to, I choose to focus on these two for now, although Instagram used to happily post to Twitter, Tumblr et. al. before the Meta merge. Any further syndication must make use of protocols, standards, and APIs to automate the connection where possible, and the tried and tested RSS feed is always available if required.

This covers the basic needs, but there are limits to the types of content I can publish directly from the site. The blog format comes from a much simpler time, and there are more possibilities than just text and pictures, especially for those of a creative ilk.

For example, I would love a better way to deliver short form video from the site, then syndicate it out to the Instagram Stories or Reels that I still use directly.

More metadata would be useful, such as well-structured event and location details that syndicate targets can make use of. My posts occasionally include musical cues, so attaching those in a more reliable (and provider-selectable) format will help. It would also be good to somehow collate my likes and other interactions from elsewhere back onto the site.

So, what I’m really looking for is a way to compose any type of content on the site. Audio, Video, Photos, Text, Event Information, and whatever else may come. Then syndicate it out in a format that other services can usefully interpret and respond to. All without compromising editorial control.

And it’s getting there.

Next: Into the Fediverse

(Photo taken by Manton Reesce (@manton) at Fediverse House, SXSW 2025)

https://heathenstorm.com/2025/04/25/startin-up-a-posse/

#censorship #culture #indieweb #posse #rss #socialmedia #syndication #technology #truth #wordpress #DigitalManifesto