Who are you on the web? Are you what your Linkedin says you are? Or your Facebook? What about Instagram? Mastodon? TikTok? Reddit? You probably wouldn’t say any one of those is really you. Each of these represent only a fraction of our collective self on the Internet, none of them truly embodying our real, complete personage as we want it known. We rent these spaces to share our fractured selves, but we don’t actually own our identities, our words or our relationships. They are locked inside each of the individual silos, for the gain of corporations, not for the welfare of we the people who give those spaces life and value.
To combat this digital decay, we have the IndieWeb, a movement engineered to reclaim our created content, establish more resilient comm…
Who are you on the web? Are you what your Linkedin says you are? Or your Facebook? What about Instagram? Mastodon? TikTok? Reddit? You probably wouldn’t say any one of those is really you. Each of these represent only a fraction of our collective self on the Internet, none of them truly embodying our real, complete personage as we want it known. We rent these spaces to share our fractured selves, but we don’t actually own our identities, our words or our relationships. They are locked inside each of the individual silos, for the gain of corporations, not for the welfare of we the people who give those spaces life and value.
To combat this digital decay, we have the IndieWeb, a movement engineered to reclaim our created content, establish more resilient communities and control exactly how and what we want to share with the world. The IndieWeb isn’t universal though, and it lacks some of the social capabilities we’ve come to know and enjoy that these other platforms possess. How can we reconcile the notion of using the IndieWeb as our singular, canonical point-of-presence on the Internet while also continuing to subordinate and store our content in the traditional, corporate-owned platforms? One answer, is PESOS.
PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It’s a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd-party platform, then using infrastructure (e.g. feeds, Micropub, webhooks), create an archive copy on your site. 1
Similar to PESOS (but in reverse), the IndieWeb community also espouses a similar syndication model, POSSE—which is the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties. 2
NOTE: In practice, though POSSE may be more IndieWeb-forward, I think it is a less realistic and less-useful model as it does not allow you to fully exist inside the social communities you are interacting with. Rather, you are posting things natively to your site and having that content forklifted to various services across the Internet. This content often doesn’t respect the nuanced manner and specific contexts in which you are expected to post (e.g. character limits, hashtags, @handles, etc...). For this reason, we’ll primarily discuss PESOS.
PESOS when coupled with an IndieWeb presence, is a simple model which allows us to achieve data soverignty, optimally curate how we express ourselves, and establish a canonical presence for ourselves on the web. Since we are archiving content back to our own site, we can own it outright. Since we choose what we want to archive, and exactly how it is displayed, we are free to be exactly who we want to be. And since everything is going to a singular spot, that you own, it can be a permanent place for anyone to find you, in perpetuity.
If you’re looking for further inspiration and examples of this in action, check out the following sites which have done an awesome job bringing PESOS to life!
This all sounds great right? But how exactly do we do this…
How to PESOS
Some things are easier said than done, and with PESOS, this is true in many ways. There are a few things to consider when you are architecting a PESOS-driven syndication / archival strategy.
- Ensure you have a repository (i.e. a website) that you own for everything to go to
- Understand what exactly you want to archive
- Will you archive content in a manual or automation fashion?
- Acquire tooling/technology to perform archival / syndication
Own Your Website, Own Your Data
To not fall into the same content ownership trap that we’ve traditionally had with centralized platforms, it is important that the site you use, the one you are “PESOS-ing” to, is one that you own. Ownership in this context means…
- You purchase and are able to use a custom domain name
- You have some level of access to all your content (e.g. backups of all your posts and other relevant data/files)
There are site/blog-hosting platforms out there that offer one-of, but not both of these qualities.
For example, consider a platform where you retain access to your data, but your site exists under a subdomain of the larger parent company (e.g. “shellsharks.medium.com”). If you ever decided to leave this platform, or the platform disappears, or enshittifies, you may retain your content, but your identity disappears with it. Similarly, consider a platform where you can bring your own domain name, but your content is locked away in some proprietary CMS. If you don’t take precautionary measures to keep regular backups of your content, you could lose that content completely in the event of service closure, or merely at the whims of the provider.
Only with both of these criteria can you resiliently port your data and identity to different web hosts and blogging platforms, retaining ownership of your data, and not losing the all-so-important pointer to your self on the web (i.e. your domain name).
Speaking of data ownership, let’s discuss what’s important to you…
What Should You Archive?
Do you want to bring everything you post elsewhere on the Internet back to your site? What does everything even mean? Replies, boosts, likes, posts—everything? Maybe you do. I know I don’t. It’s just something you need to decide for yourself, based on what’s important for you to archive, what you want to have exposed on your site, and what you think you’ll want in the future.
I for example, was not interested in archiving a lot of my social interactions. I don’t care to bring back “likes”, or “boosts/reposts”. Even the overwhelming majority of my “reply posts” are not something I care to keep long term—they serve no useful purpose as reference material, and in most cases are just li’l blurbs like “heya! 👋”. Not exactly worth retaining a copy of every instance of this. Even a lot of my regular, original “posts” are not worth keeping as they are either me manually syndicating (POSSE-style) something I’ve published first on my site, or they are simply (and pardon my french) shitposts. I don’t need these things permalinked on my site.
Once you’ve got the general idea of what you want to archive, you’ll be better informed as to how you plan to archive this content.
Manual and/or Automated Syndication
Whether to manually or automatically syndicate content to your site is as much a technological challenge as it is a philosophical question. For me, I prefer a more highly curated approach to what I share on my site. So I am hesitant to auto-publish content that originates across my Internet-of-platforms back to my site without either first reviewing / approving (and often enriching) it or unless their is robust logic in place which determines whether I would want it archived.
Once you’ve settled on an approach though, a new challenge is born. Manually archiving is very time consuming, and does not scale well. You have to either have A LOT of time on your hands (if you post a lot elsewhere), or just not have a lot you care to archive back. On the other hand, automatic syndication requires bespoke tooling & technology. Some combination of services or hosted-scripts that can be triggered to grab content from one place, transform it, and then put it on your site. Let’s talk about that tooling & technology.
Archival Tooling & Technology
There’s a lot of tools out there to archive your stuff. Not all of it works. Not all of it is compatible with the blogging / site platform you may have chosen. Not all of it will work with the services you are trying to extract content from. Some of the tech is only semi-automatic. You’ll have to do some research and cobble together what actually works to achieve the results you’ve decided you want.
If you’re on Mastodon (as I am), you may be interested in using the Mastodon Markdown Archive utility. It’s author, Gabriel explains how he uses it for archiving and syndicating Mastodon posts. In fact, I used this tool for my own Mastodon Auto-PESOS needs.
The IndieWeb is a thriving network of communities, and PESOS is not some nascent ideology. There’s a groundswell of people looking to reclaim their data and their identities. As such, there is a lot of tooling out there, already built, that you can find and use to archive your data, the PESOS-way.
The beauty of the IndieWeb, is that it’s all about you. Your data, your identity, your choice. You can choose to archive stuff, you could not! You can archive things and then delete them later. You can choose how your content looks, edit it, add to it, whatever! PESOS is the best of all worlds. You can continue to participate in the centralized platforms, for all their social utility, but remain fully in control of your data and your identity. Perfect!
References
** Published: January 21, 2026
** Tags: #technology #indieweb ** Word count: 1574