Channels you own

Tomorrow LinkedIn locks your account. No reason, no appeal, no warning. What is left?

If you found this post through LinkedIn: it reached you through a channel we do not own. That is fine — as long as it is not the only one.

The Sunday edition on the visibility machine covered the channel question at the overview level. This part picks up where it gets concrete: what does “ownership” even mean for a channel — and what do the alternatives look like that many SME decision-makers have never heard of?

Borrowed reach is a concentration risk

Build an audience on a platform for ten years and you own — nothing. Access to it belongs to the platform: the algorithm decides who sees your posts (and likes to throttle anything that carries links elsewhere). The rules can change, the account can be suspended — if in doubt without explanation and without appeal. You do not even know your own followers’ addresses.

That is not a conspiracy theory, it is the business model: the platform rents out attention. Rent can rise, tenancies can end. Anyone who builds their marketing entirely on it has set up their shop window in a building whose house rules they neither know nor influence.

The model: hub and spokes

Our answer is an old pattern taken newly seriously: the hub belongs to us, the spokes carry outward. The hub: website, blog, newsletter list, RSS. Each spoke has a different ownership level — and that is deliberate, in ascending order:

Tier 1, rented: LinkedIn. That is where the decision-makers are, so we are there too — professional and with clear boundaries: teasers on publication day, hand-written replies, no automation (the terms of use forbid it for profiles, and we keep rules even when nobody is watching). LinkedIn is a shop window, never a warehouse.

Tier 2, protocol-anchored: Bluesky. New to most people: Bluesky looks like a lean Twitter but is built on an open protocol. The property that matters for companies: the username is a domain. We are not @analytikdata1234 there — we go by the same name as our website. The proof that the account is genuine is baked into the name itself, cryptographically anchored through a DNS record only we can set. Setting up a company account takes an evening; the domain verification is the only technical step, and it is one your webmaster knows.

Tier 3, self-hosted: the Fediverse. Again new to many: the Fediverse is not a service but a federation of thousands of independent servers speaking the same protocol — Mastodon is its best-known member. You can open an account on someone else’s server. Or you take the step we took: run your own node. Our instance runs on our infrastructure, under our address, with our rules. Nobody can suspend this account, nobody can change the algorithm — there is none. Ownership in social media does not get more radical than that. Effort: for a lean single-account instance (GoToSocial), one weekend afternoon plus normal server maintenance.

Tier 0, the foundation: the newsletter. Unspectacular and superior to everything: a double-opt-in address list on our own system. No algorithm between us and the readers, exportable, portable. If every platform disappears tomorrow, the line stays open.

What gets automated — and what never does

The tiering pays off in automation, because the rules differ by ownership level: on the own instance and on Bluesky, the agent distributes every news item automatically — open protocols, official APIs, explicitly allowed. On LinkedIn, automation stops at the draft: scheduling and replying happen by hand. And in communities like forums: not at all. Automated promotion there burns the very reputation the whole exercise is about.

The credibility dividend comes free: a company telling the “Own Your Stack” story while renting its channels from two corporations would be its own counterargument. Being present on the open networks is part of the message — and that is where you reach exactly the audience that makes such decisions professionally: developers, admins, privacy people. It is smaller than on LinkedIn. It is the right one.

Getting started, pragmatically

If you want to begin tomorrow, in this order:

1. Start a newsletter list — self-hosted or with a European provider with an export guarantee. From the first subscriber onward, you own reach.
2. Bluesky account with a domain handle — one evening, one DNS record, and your company is verifiably present.
3. Fediverse: account first, own node later — you can start on an existing instance; your own server is the expansion step once tiers 1 and 2 are running.

And the test question that sums it all up: if your most important channel changes the rules tomorrow — what is left to you? If the answer is “nothing”, you know where to start.

Part 1 of the Marketing series. On Sunday the Sunday edition closes out the summer: two months in reader numbers — measured, of course, without surveilling anyone.