POSSE
I’m an advocate for owning your content, and publishing on your own platform. There’s a term for that - POSSE.
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content. - source - https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Related content
- From Hanselminutes - Micro.blog and owning your words with Manton Reece
- My notes on what a digital garden is
Async operations in distributed systems
A video from SST goes into how to handle this with AWS
- The simplest way to handle this is
API + Lambdaworker (Endpoint + Compute) - Similar, but more robust is
API + Queue + Lambda(Endpoint + Message queue + Compute)
The compute layer isn’t just limited to Lambda/serverless - you can also spinning up fargate containers as and when needed, or just rely on your own dedicated servers.
The general idea is a client facing API gateway receives job requests, and immediately responds to the client, then begins processing in the background.
Introducing a message queue really ups the game on robustness. It brings in the following capabilities, and more:
- Built-in retry mechanisms
- Ensures job is not lost if the worker fails. If the worker crashes, message remains in queue
- Load balancing - buffers incoming jobs during high traffic
Good old cron jobs are useful for workflows that don’t need you to trigger processing via an endpoint. I like to use GitHub Actions for these. Your cloud provider will likely have many options for setting up cron jobs.
Marketplace Dynamics
Recent conversations about marketplace products have prompted me to revisit my notes on network effects.
In summary, it’s
When a product gets more valuable to its users as a result of acquiring more users
Network effects have a big influence on the success or failure of a marketplace product.