Leon Furze

This is a post to explain my process of publishing. I’m writing it because, although I’ve been doing this for years, I didn’t have the language to explain it until now.

I’ve had a blog for over fifteen years, and have always used my own website as a central location for posting content. Social media platforms come and go (Bye bye Google+! Bye bye Twitter!), but your own site is a safe space as long as you can afford the domain.

The internet is a great place, and has been an important part of my life. Despite big tech trying to turn the world wide web into a very Narrow Web, it’s still possible to find gardens that grow outside the company walls.

With growing dissatisfaction about the state of the internet, I spent a few months in 2025 digging into things like the fediverse (Mastodon etc.), self-hosting, and other ways of reclaiming the internet from companies like Google. On my travels, I came across the term POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

It perfectly captures the approach I’ve been using to publish for over a decade. Here’s how it works in my case.

Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere

The hub of my publishing is this website, https://leonfurze.com. It’s a WordPress hosted website, which is the platform that sits underneath and allows me to write blogs, manage the code of the site, and so on. When I make a new post it is automatically given a date-stamped URL (like the one for this post), and shows up on my website’s “blogroll” alongside other posts.

For social media, I use three platforms. The Jetpack plugin (a standard part of the WordPress platform) automatically pushes to LinkedIn and Bluesky. I generally have the LinkedIn push turned off because I prefer to write longer posts.

I recently installed a second plugin called ActivityPub Plugin. This turns the website itself into a profile in the fediverse. Essentially, leonfurze.com becomes an account that can interact with platforms like Mastodon: it can post, receive comments, and automatically share content. A huge advantage of this is that if someone comments on my post on Mastodon, it appears on the actual blog post. If I reply on the blog, it sends to Mastodon. If someone follows me on Mastodon, they also follow my WordPress blog. It’s a great example of how the fediverse works and worth investigating if you’re interested.

As well as social media, I syndicate the blog directly to Substack and Medium. This means that users of those platforms can subscribe to my blog there. They’ll get posts slightly delayed from the main blog, since I update them about once a week.

For medium, I use a little javascript bookmark I made which copies the current browser tab URL to the clipboard and then opens the Medium import page in a new tab. This is quite lazy, but having the browser bookmark in front of me helps me to remember to actually do it. If you’re interested bookmark code needs to be copied into the URL field of a new bookmark:

javascript:(async()=>{try{  await navigator.clipboard.writeText(location.href);  alert('✓ URL copied to clipboard – just press Paste in Medium');}catch(e){  prompt('Copy this manually then press OK',location.href);}window.open('https://medium.com/p/import','_blank');})();

For Substack, I use the RSS import feature. This pulls the last 10 posts from https://leonfurze.com/feed and updates any old posts within that most recent collection. That’s why, if you’re on my Substack, you’ll see my podcast episodes mixed in with my blog posts – Substack can’t tell the difference between the two in my feed.

Speaking of RSS… I love RSS. It’s old fashioned, but Really Simple Syndication is a pretty universal way that many websites use to share information. A website’s RSS feed is like a continuous scrolling wall of code that contains all of the recent new content. If you don’t speak HTML, it looks a bit like gibberish:

But that gibberish can tell websites when you’re updating, and can be used for various automations. You can also create your own custom RSS feeds, which I have done using raindrop.io for my AI-Reads feed: an ongoing collection of articles on GenAI which I’ve curated from across the internet.

AI Reads

I have a separate RSS feed that handles my podcast, which is a fairly recent addition to the blog. My podcast is a “blogcast”, a recording of me (the real me, not AI me) reading each of the articles aloud. It’s also another example of the POSSE approach, and allows me to further syndicate my audio blog onto platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Check it out here:

Podcast

And finally, once a week my recent posts go out to my mailing list, along with any other interesting AI snippets that have happened recently. The mailing list has been a serious project of mine this year, because I believe it is the best way to get my writing in front of people that does not rely on social media or big tech. If you’re on my mailing list, you also have a direct connection back to me for any questions and comments.

Over 10,000 educators have joined the mailing list now, and I’ll be pouring more and more energy into it over the coming months and years.

Start to finish

So, here’s the process from start to finish:

1. Write the original blog post (see this article for more on that process, and how AI does and does not play a part).
2. Publish on WordPress
3. Jetpack pushes to Bluesky
4. ActivityPub Plugin syndicates to fediverse
5. Manual LinkedIn post
6. Syndicate to Medium via URL copy/paste
7. Syndicate to Substack via RSS
8. Record podcast version
9. Syndicate to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon via RSS
10. Weekly newsletter to mailing list

Once everything is set up, it only takes a few minutes to manage. If you’re a writer, or an aspiring writer, I’d really encourage you to untether yourself as much as possible from social media platforms and for-profit platforms like Substack and Medium. By all means, meet your audience where they’re at, but make sure you own your own content.

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