Over the past few weeks as I’ve been grappling with colon cancer, it has been soooooooooo tempting to just pop open the Facebook app, write a story in the box and press “Share”.
Simple. Easy. Done!
Or inside the Twitter app… or LinkedIn… or… or...
But here’s the problem with that...
All the stories get LOCKED INSIDE A PLATFORM!
They are there living on the platform’s servers, inside the platform’s systems. Maybe they are visible publicly, maybe they aren’t. Maybe they will be around in two years, maybe they won’t. Maybe people will find them, maybe they won’t.
The future of your stories is entirely at the whim of the platform.
As I wrote about on the Internet Society’s blog earlier this year, one of my own guiding principles is “POSSE“, a content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement:
Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere
And so over these past few weeks, I tried really hard to do that with my journey through cancer: the diagnosis, followed by the recovery, followed by the results.
But it’s HARD. It was so insanely tempting yesterday when I got the great news just to pop open Facebook and share it with everyone.
But when I do that… it’s shared ONLY within Facebook’s shiny “walled garden”. It’s not shared with people I know who choose NOT to use Facebook. It’s not shared with the communities I’m in on other social networks.
The “open Web” on top of the “open Internet” is really the only way to do that. But it’s hard. There’s extra steps involved for me right now with the way my various blogs are set up. I want to work to make that easier and simpler… but doing so will take time… which is challenging to find.
But if we don’t find ways to OWN OUR OWN STORIES then they will stay locked away in closed, proprietary walled gardens. And maybe that’s fine for some of those stories. Maybe they are small and mundane… “in the moment” stories that we don’t really care about. But even so, we feed the platforms. We help them to grow.
I’ll keep trying to follow the POSSE rule… and I’ll be writing more here about that.
Image credit: Tom Kelly on Flickr CC BY NC ND
