Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
RSS is my preferred way to consume blog posts. I also find blogs that have an RSS feed to be more interested in actually writing interesting content rather than just trying to get views/advertise. I guess this makes sense—hard to monetize views through an RSS reader
It's funny back in the Google Reader days monetizing via RSS was quite common. You'd publish the truncated version to RSS and force someone to visit the site for the whole version, usually just in exchange for ad views. Honestly while it wasn't the greatest use of RSS it was better than most paid blogs today being ad-wall pop-up pay-gate nightmares of UX.
The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.
> The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users.
I have never seen an RSS client or crawler preload actual HTML pages. I've only seen them fetching the XML feed and present its contents to the users.
When I talk about visitors arriving at my website from RSS feeds, I am not counting requests from feed aggregators or readers identified by their 'User-Agent' strings. Those are just software tools fetching the XML feed. I'm not talking about them. What I am referring to are visits to HTML pages on my website where the 'Referer' header indicates that the client came from an RSS aggregator service or feed reader.
It is entirely possible that many more people read my posts directly in their feed readers without ever visiting my site, and I will never be aware of them, as it should be. For the subset of readers who do click through from their feed reader and land on my website, those visits are recorded in my web server logs. My conclusions are based on that data.
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.
Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ
There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.
Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.
I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so.
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
I know it’s gotten some push back but to be honest I’m fond of the more manual approach that you take on HN.
While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.
I definitely won't be automating submission to places like HN.
I figure if you chose to follow me on Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn there's no ethical issue at all with me automating the process of having my new blog entries show up in my feeds there, as opposed to copying-and-pasting the links by hand.
Have you looked at https://posseparty.com/ as a possible option? Supports integrations with those platforms and more, and "all" it needs is an Atom feed!
Ooh I hadn't seen that. I'm still hung up on character limits - I want to make sure the summary I include isn't truncated with ... and is instead the right length for that particular platform.
If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
This strategy is an alternative to PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site) [0]. I really like this read on the indieweb website, it explains well why adopt this strategy for federation and emphasizes that "Friends are more important than federation", something a lot of nerds and hackers forget when defending their ideals.
You can have both! POSSE to post multiple places. PESOS to pull in anything posted directly in other places, i.e. anything that didn't originate from a POSSE post.
> Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around api usage and automation can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
Buffer documents a number of workflows and limitations in their FAQs.
E.g. for a non-professional Instagram account, the user gets a notification to manually share a post via the Instagram app.
> you can prepare your post in Buffer, receive a notification on your mobile device when it’s time to post, then tap the notification and copy your post over to the social network to finish posting.
Postiz docs show that users can create an app on Facebook and use that key and it will auto post.
I guess using POSSE for Instagram forces you to either create a personal app on Facebook which is not easy or make your Instagram account a business account.
Havent been able to figure this out for Instagram - also the only social media that is still relevant for me.
(thankfully?) never got into twitter where it seems to be easy.
I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
I really want to implement this, but i havent been able to figure out how to do it for Instagram (the only social media that is really relevant in my friend circle) and whatsapp/signal groups other than doing it manually.
If anyone has tips, especially for Insta let me know...
This is my approach and I fully recommend it. My personal website is my canonical home address on the web. It has outlived a few platforms and many rounds of enshittification.
A few caveats:
- You will have different communities on each social network. Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users, it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of choice.
- Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly different messaging. This is partly due to the format each platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different conversations.
- Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine participant in each community, even if you just repost the same stuff. Automation does not help much there.
- RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control, and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly want to follow you might never see your updates.
- You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on the internet, and it should stay yours
- People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.
How do you fellow HN'ers separate their online with their corporate identity and day job?
I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/ your employer.
I only work for small companies that don’t have any business interest in areas where I want to maintain independent side projects.
When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got acquired my a major corporation, I refused the bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving about a year later.
Don’t get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
My experience is that bosses read my blog, then when they or a fellow manager need to hire someone, have reached out to me asking me to apply. So it cuts both ways - maybe your shitty boss sees you blogging and sharing your experience, but a good boss will see that and go "I want this passionate and curious person to work for me".
IDK, your average boss is just a dude who has bills to pay and mouths to feed. They don't really care what happens as long as you're not doing something stupid, especially visibly and on their time.
I've been doing this for years with my site, and it's brought me a lot of joy that I can go back and search my site for various posts I've made over the last decade across all the platforms I use - I have a more high friction setup, but that's because of my own terrible choices
It’s almost like HN is a great platform for the POSSE model!
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
POSSE can be applied to more than just social networks, it can be used to disrupt every marketplace!
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
This post like many recent ones like it, essentially wants the internet to go backwards to what it once was pre-LLMs [edit: and pre-concentration]. I'd like to suggest that you should follow through and go all the way to pre-internet itself, and rediscover handwriting, in-person local meeting groups, non-digital relationships, and using your hands not on a keyboard. Today I (with difficulty) left my macbook closed all day until this evening (and this comment). Small steps.
I understand this attitude but when I look back at my rural youth I just hear you telling me that I should have had no one to talk to at all about many things.
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
[1] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
I have never seen an RSS client or crawler preload actual HTML pages. I've only seen them fetching the XML feed and present its contents to the users.
When I talk about visitors arriving at my website from RSS feeds, I am not counting requests from feed aggregators or readers identified by their 'User-Agent' strings. Those are just software tools fetching the XML feed. I'm not talking about them. What I am referring to are visits to HTML pages on my website where the 'Referer' header indicates that the client came from an RSS aggregator service or feed reader.
It is entirely possible that many more people read my posts directly in their feed readers without ever visiting my site, and I will never be aware of them, as it should be. For the subset of readers who do click through from their feed reader and land on my website, those visits are recorded in my web server logs. My conclusions are based on that data.
- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information
- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups
- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings
- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged
Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
1000x yes to this! It can be really frustrating when a link takes me to FB, TW, IG, etc. - none of which I use.
I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.
Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ
I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.
While I don’t follow nor am I necessarily interested in everything that you cover, I do appreciate the presence of having something like a local “correspondent” around when you do appear to provide trails of supplementary commentary. The lengths that I see you go through to do all of this tastefully and transparently are not unnoticed.
I figure if you chose to follow me on Bluesky/Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn there's no ethical issue at all with me automating the process of having my new blog entries show up in my feeds there, as opposed to copying-and-pasting the links by hand.
But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter.
There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blobs of signed content that can be added to anything - HTML pages, P2P protocols, embedded into emails and tweets - maybe we can hijack the current systems and have distributed identity and publishing take over.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/PESOS
Somewhat related, predictions for the future of the web by IWC contritbutors:
https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-round-up-dec-2025
At the risk of stating the obvious: this can get tricky, many popular social media platforms restrict automated posting. Policies around api usage and automation can change often and may not even be fully public as some might overlap anti spam measures.
0. https://buffer.com
1. https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app
Buffer documents a number of workflows and limitations in their FAQs.
E.g. for a non-professional Instagram account, the user gets a notification to manually share a post via the Instagram app.
> you can prepare your post in Buffer, receive a notification on your mobile device when it’s time to post, then tap the notification and copy your post over to the social network to finish posting.
source: https://support.buffer.com/article/658-using-notification-pu...
I guess using POSSE for Instagram forces you to either create a personal app on Facebook which is not easy or make your Instagram account a business account.
I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing
A few caveats:
- You will have different communities on each social network. Your personal website might be home to you, but to your users, it's not. You're just another creator on their platform of choice.
- Each community has its own vibe, and commands slightly different messaging. This is partly due to the format each platform allows. Each post will create parallel but different conversations.
- Dumping links is frowned upon. You should be a genuine participant in each community, even if you just repost the same stuff. Automation does not help much there.
- RSS and newsletters are the only audiences that you control, and they're worth growing. Everywhere else, people who explicitly want to follow you might never see your updates.
- You should own the domain you post to. This is your address on the internet, and it should stay yours
- People do check your personal website. I was surprised to hear friends and acquaintances refer to things I post on my website.
I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that your average boss is going to have a prying eye on your online activities and may even use them against you one way or another e.g. if you offer services/work on side projects that may in any way may compete w/ your employer.
Anyone got experience to share in that regard?
Thinking about this famous precedent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195#27425041
When a startup I was working at made a successful exit and got acquired my a major corporation, I refused the bonus contract and froze my side project activity until leaving about a year later.
Don’t get cute. Avoid side projects that compete with your employer, and disclose unrelated side projects properly so that your employer is forced to acknowledge them. Do what it takes to avoid entanglement, making sacrifices if necessary.
Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268055
A website to destroy all websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784
Awesome share thanks for the link. Will send to a family member who is looking to gain viewership with their writing - they usually post on medium I think.
https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/LICENSE.tx...
In fact, I’m building open source SaaS for every vertical and leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace.
Social media is a marketplace as well. The good being sold is people’s content and the cost you pay is with your attention. The marketplace’s cut is ads and selling your data.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater