Substack, Posse, and the age of intellectual deindustrialization
I dislike and distrust Substack. It’s centralized, funded by people I distrust, has an unmitigated history of giving a pass (and profiting from) to some pretty hateful content, and could very well end up another Twitter in short order. It’s also where some of my favorite sort of nerds are, particularly around the World Machines project. RSS won’t suffice; I want to be a participant. We all need community.
So how to bridge the gap? I’m not moving over there wholesale. I like my newsletter. I don’t want a platform. Substack’s functionality around cross-posting is nearly non-existent. You can do a big one-time import; using it as a mere endpoint instead of the center of your universe is discouraged. (Another reason not to trust it; this feels deliberate.)
Thus: POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Twitter was centralized and launched a fair number of folks’ Personal Brands and/or social lives and/or careers. That world is dead, gone, buried under a steaming pile of musk.
A couple years ago, this would be a conundrum. Do I do the one-off import and then copy and paste everything by hand? Just give up? Track down a syncing service and hope it stays alive? Find the time to write something custom?
The latter one there–roll your own–was until recently untenable for more than a handful of projects at a time, at least for us mere mortals. Now, though, ideas like that turn into Claude Code sessions. And so did this one.
So: welcome, Possumus. Sort of the same idea as Posse Party; different sync targets. Possumus is an Elixir Phoenix app that watches your specified RSS feed and republishes to your targets. It’ll backfill as a one-off operation if you’d like. I’ve tested Substack (with this very post) and have the wiring in there for (Convert)Kit. It’s not a huge announcement; I (with heavy agent assistance) built this entirely to scratch my own itch, and it does that. And I think that we can collectively do that now is neat!
The chaos and swirl as we deal with strengthening large models and improving harnesses and horrific politics and power dynamics is far from settled. But it’s cool that I can just stand this up and use it. Some was Claude-built, but some was local: DS4 Flash runs great on my Macbook Pro, and pi makes for a good-enough harness to drive it. There’s definitely a full post in there about The Age Of Intellectual Deindustrialization and I’d like to write it–but don’t want to hold up this post over it.
Possumus is free (beer and source). If you’d like to use it, the source is there to hack on–hosting the source on Radicle feels philosophically aligned. I’ve gone to the trouble to persistently host the service; email me if you’d like an account too!
And who knows, maybe this’ll get me unblocked and publishing again.
