A number of people have posted recently on the subject of POSSE (Dave Winer, Tantek Celik, The Verge, and Bix Fronkonis). POSSE is an acronym for Publish On (your own) Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Dave Winer has also been talking about Textcasting, where he proposes that blogging/social media tools support a common set of features. Dave Winer also talks about “Two-Way RSS”, which I think means that a tool can generate RSS feeds and can use RSS feeds as an input to posts within the tool. I would like to explore these ideas further in the next few paragraphs.

Recently, I got the impression that a Textcasting use case is to allow a user to write in their tool/platform, and have that output be accepted on other platforms as “first-class posts”. What I mean by that is the post appears on the other platform to have been written by the user using the platform’s own tools. Now, a number of platforms don’t support all the features in the Textcasting spec, so even if the other platform accepts input from the user’s platform, it may not represent the text as it appeared in the original platform. In this instance, I might call that a “second-class post”. It may have all the text from the original user platform, but not the styling, or links, or an enclosure.

So, it seems to me that the target of Textcasting is to get Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon/Twitter/Facebook to support the Textcasting feature set (which I assume they don’t, or at least not equally). In each of these cases, the user must have an account on those platforms, so they have an identity and the platform can recognize who is posting. Dave Winer mentions that other blogging tools that support peering for the Textcasting feature set is WordPress and micro.blog. Again, both of these tools require a user account, same as the social media tools listed above, for the same reasons.

What about people who just want to post on your own site? Go ahead – nothing stopping you! For people that want their message to go further, we shall have to wait and see if those platforms are open to change. For open source platforms (Mastodon), someone could make changes in a Mastodon version to support Textcasting. The other aspect of the social media platforms, to me, is that they are social. If you are a writer that wants to have interaction with your readers, and your readers are on those platforms, it makes sense to “get your message out there”.