I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.
It's not a dogma so much as a warning from experience. If you post to your own site first you do retain control. If you rely on the silos' api to extract it back to your site you are dependent on them remaining committed to their api. That has not been a good bet in the last decade.
Right, that is the thing people say, but it isn't always true -- you're not more dependent one way or the other with a lot of content workflows. The Lemmy folks break the way I get my posts from their RSS feed format every so often. That's fine, their software's under development. I manually copy-paste the post that failed to PESOS over to my site, and I don't post via Lemmy again until I get the time to fix the integration.
Would I have been saved from that if using their API to post from my site? Well... no, their API is also in a things-change-all-the-time state. Plus I'd have to have a lot more logic in my site build system to handle failure modes in a way that wouldn't spam their system.
And realistically, given the huge portion of us that are using brid.gy for the POSSE we do, that's an external dependency that makes POSSE at least as Theoretically Problematic as PESOS in some large percentage of its real-world use.
If the value of the integration really relies on having the content in both places, I'm dependent either way. (How many people get readers of their single-Tweet-on-a-page microblogs when they're not integrated with Twitter or Mastodon?)
I like the idea of Absolute Control, but once you actually dig into the value that POSSE or PESOS gives when you're using it for more than a "Here's my blog post about my blog's technical stack" usecase... you realize it's still dependency on the whims of some other site's policies (RIP Instagram POSSE) in order to engage with your readers/audience/community there. As long as you want that engagement, you have that dependency. That's okay! If it were about Total Purity, we'd all be running Gopher servers on Raspberry Pis or something.
