Syndication

Inspired by Cory Doctorow, I've been thinking about the IndieWeb idea of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and how to extend the reach of my blog posts. So I'm trying something new and syndicating blog posts to dev.to.

dev.to makes this quite nice with native support a "canonical URL" for posts originally published elsewhere. It's also pretty easy to repost existing content to since it supports Markdown (my posts are written in reStructuredText for my website but can be easily converted to Markdown using pandoc) and future posts can be automatically shared to dev.to via an RSS feed.

Existing posts on dev.to is variable in quality, and there are multiple posts criticising the platform for low-quality blogspam, but I don't think that's a reason to avoid posting to the platform (as long as it's not the exclusive home to your posts). My goal here is to extend the reach of my writing, not to gain some sort of prestige-by-association from the sites where I syndicate my posts, so the presence of blogspam on dev.to doesn't put me off from sharing my posts there. And blogspam is sadly a fact of life on any platform that's easy to post to.

It's also worth noting that I've considered and rejected syndicating my posts to Medium due to their monetisation & obnoxious popups, and SubStack due to their problematic hosting of TERFs.

So, assuming I don't find any reason to cancel this experiment, you'll be able to read my writing at dev.to/pbarker as well as on Mastodon and on my website.