cross-posting

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Cross-posting is the social media practice of syndicating or placing the same content, possibly slightly modified, on numerous different websites.

For example, an organisation will have a blog post on its own website that it copies to websites of other places with similar objectives or to silos such as LinkedIn where a larger audience may see it. This is essentially POSSE without the name, practised by people who don't know that they are being a little bit indieweb in doing so. It is often accompanied by an apology, such as "Apologies for cross-posting". (The apologies are ostensibly meant for people who are following them on multiple platforms and thus seeing the same message multiple times.)

Reframing and extending cross-posting

The Indieweb extends and differentiates the broader concept of cross-posting or syndication and breaks it down, in part, first by ownership and secondly by the source of the post and the targets to which the original are sent.

For the ideal digital ownership, one should post their content and data on their own site first (or a site which they can control and easily import/export their data). Then to extend their reach beyond the readership of their site they should only later (or simultaneously) syndicate or cross-post it to other sites for greater distribution.

The most common IndieWeb defined syndication models are as follows:

POSSE

POSSE is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site.

PESOS

PESOS is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It's a Syndication Model where publishing flow starts with posting to 3rd party services, then using some infrastructure (e.g. feeds, pingbacks, webhooks) to create an archive copy under your domain.

PESETAS

PESETAS is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate Everything To A Silo. It's a Syndication Model where publishing flow starts with posting to 3rd party services, then using some settings/infrastructure (e.g. share settings, feeds, pingbacks, webhooks) to create a unified composite stream at a specific silo, for ease of following ("just follow my Tumblr for everything") and/or archival backup.

PASTA

PASTA is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Anywhere, Save To (private) Archive, the practice of automatically saving a copy of whatever you post on (social media) silos to someplace else under your own control, like a private directory on your own server, or a local folder on your laptop that is less vulnerable to site-death.

S2S

Silo to Silo: This is the syndication method typically seen by most people on the internet in 2017 and before. They post something on one silo, say Medium, and then cross-post it to one or more of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and potentially thousands of others. While this shotgun approach helps in terms of reach, it does very little to protect either their initial ownership or the longterm existence of their content on the internet. (See also PESETAS).

POOSNOW

POOSNOW is an acronym for Post On One Silo, No Others on Web - This is the worst option because the single silo post is the most fragile with respect to both ownership and longevity on the internet given the high incidence and potential for the individual silo to be purchased, acqui-hired, shut down, go bankrupt, or simply disappear altogether. (See site-deaths for more detail and a plethora of examples.)

Silo Examples

Early Prior examples

Ping.fm was a social networking and micro-blogging web service that enabled users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on Ping.fm pushed the update to a number of different social websites at once. Ping.fm was shut down on 5 July 2012, to be replaced by Seesmic Ping which was later acquired by HootSuite.
FriendFeed. While FriendFeed was a much stronger aggregator of content from a multitued of silos, it also operated as a stand-alone silo which also pushed content published to it natively to other silos. In some sense it operated as a switchboard that allowed it to interconnect a multitude of sites. It was eventually bought out and shut down by Facebook.

Current Examples

Facebook, Twitter, Google+: Typically the largest social media platforms don't allow or encourage syndication to other sites as their preference is to keep you (and your data) locked within their system. As examples Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ don't offer direct cross-posting options to competitor sites.

LinkedIn is roughly equivalent to the large services above, but does allow easy syndication to Twitter only.

Instagram allows direct syndication to Facebook (its corporate parent), Twitter, and Tumblr. One will note that syndication to Facebook sends the entire photo and data to Facebook where it appears in an "expected" fashion, while Twitter, in a corporate move meant to discourage its users from playing with Instagram, doesn't accept full syndication of data and instead of a photo only displays a link to the photo. (Previously it had accepted and shown the photo inline in Twitter feeds.) Many users use other tools in the midst of their workflows to force their syndicated photos from Instagram to Twitter to show up inline instead.

Simple syndication is usually offered by smaller social media sites to larger ones in an attempt to not only allow their users greater distribution, but by sending the data from their site, to create backlinks so that viewers on the larger site will visit the original and potentially become users to the smaller site. They're allowing syndication in an attempt to leverage eyeballs back to their own sites.

Common syndication tools

The following are commonly used (non-IndieWeb) tools used by large numbers of people to cross-post content from one silo to another:

IFTTT
Buffer

IndieWeb Examples

See also examples for POSSE, PESOS, PASTA, PESETAS:

Main article: POSSE#IndieWeb_Examples

Main article: PESOS#IndieWeb_Examples

Main article: PESETAS

Main article: PASTA#IndieWeb_Examples