You're right, and I think it's a testament to how effective POSSE is. The dinosaur platforms are scared of it, which is why they are discouraging links.

You described the solution yourself. You can still do POSSE, but instead of a link you can write something like, "link to original post is in the comments" or "originally published on my website, you know how to find it".

It may be tricky or even impossible to automate, but isn't that how you know it's good, according to PG? :)

You are far more optimistic about this than me. The web has centralized rapidly and no platform is incentivized to allow links out.

Without legislation, these platforms can build walls easier than we can build ladders. Your average user isn’t all that interested in following links in the first place, so it’s an uphill battle from every angle.

You're right, I do believe in optimism.

Though it's hard for me to imagine legislation helping the situation, since regulations are usually written for/by the big incumbents to dig a deeper moat around themselves.

So, walled gardens are now the dinosaurs and reinvention of good old planet is the new thing they're afraid of :)

> originally published on my website, you know how to find it

I don't think that works. People are already lazy to click a link, imagine having to go to the blog and then search for the actual post

To put a different spin on that point: it would be perverse to deliberately throw out the cornerstones of the web: URLs and hyperlinks.

(Not that I have a better answer to Twitter's isolationist shenanigans, mind.)

The scenario I imagine is that they already read the post on the other platform, so the reason they're going to the website is to find the latest and greatest, which appears on the other platforms with a delay, creating an incentive to go to the source.

Of course, this also requires content engaging enough to create that reaction...

Same problem with TikTok. You have to tell your viewers to check your profile and then you have a single link to your home page, and they will have to go there and dig around for whatever information you want them to see. Not ideal, but I still want to drive everyone to a domain I own rather than have them live on a platform I don't.

Pinterest banned my account the other day by mistake and it took me two weeks of pestering the shit out of them for them to admit it and reinstate it.

That's why services like LinkTree got really popular. You could do the same with your own website pretty easily.

Yeah, I use my own domain in my profile for the reason given in the article - it's pointless to drive someone off social media and land them straight onto another property you don't own.

>> I think the problem is that social media platforms, especially Twitter downranks your post if it has a link.

Huh - is this true? It anecdotally felt very true to me when posting content - is there data/reports on this somewhere to view?

The problem is that it's very hard to distinguish between "posts with links get less engagement because Twitter is subtly suppressing them" and "posts with links get less engagement because people are just less likely to click 'like' and 'retweet' on them."

I might be wrong, but IIRC, the 'links dont get clicked' was already a problem before they started adding algorithms to the timeline. This is about clicks and not engagement though.

Also, you can see how many times a tweet was viewed and interacted with in the analytics, so you could try to do your own comparison by seeing the % of views that trigger engagement

That screams antitrust.

We need to tell our legislators to go after companies that disallow or downrank external links.

Not sure about that. Because they tell you the timeline is ordered by what they think you could like - unless you change it back to 'home' - so they can just show data that tells legislators that people don't click on links, and that they interact more with threads instead.