2024-04-24 Micro-blogs

Recently, I jokingly replied to @jameschip@merveilles.town when he said "maybe we need a new word for types of blogs that have comments and federation" that we should have kept the word micro-blogs. Regular blogs, with a character limit.

Then again, micro-blogs in that sense, from Identi.ca to GNU Social, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the Fediverse now have a big plus: Notification actually works. If you mention another account, they get notified. If you get a reply, you get notified. It's glorious.

For regular blogs, notification works with the oldest, universal, federated, communication medium online: email. Conversely, if you don't have email or don't do, you don't get notified and most likely you can't even comment. 😐

I tried web-mentions and they didn't work I wanted them to. Far too few other blogs supported them, and for this blog, I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't want to send myself email so I turned them into comments, but mentions aren't as strong a signal as a comment. Mentions aren't public but comments are. Mentions don't need a strong connection to the main article but comments do. By turning mentions into comments, I had made a mistake and the result was frustrating. So I got rid of them.

I got rid of them

And so here we are, it's 2024, and blogs still don't have good (spam-free) comments and notifications where as micro-blogs do. 😢

​#Web #Blogs #Social_Media ​#Blogs #Social_Media ​#Social_Media

**2024-04-24**. I got an email from @reidrac@social.sdf.org with a link to a related blog post, where he wrestles with webmentions:

> This blog doesn’t have comments, although you can always send me an email if you want to comment anything, and some people have done that. Not often, but if I have received a handful of emails, that’s more comments that my old blog had in its last few years. – Connecting blogs

Connecting blogs

James also had this to say:

> If your blog then has comments, and likes, and people on other platforms can comment, like, and share posts directly, is it really a blog any more? … Should blogs even have comments and notifications?

I don't know.

I know that back when the Old School RPG blogosphere was strong, there were often questions that got tackled by multiple people. You'd see a post about something interesting and post your own take and link back to the original. More people would jump onto the band-wagon, link to the four or five related blog posts they could find and add their take. It was cool! Those "replies" weren't just replies, they sometimes built on what had been said before, reformulated it, distilled it. It was great! The replies were also hard to find, unfortunately. People relied on the blogrolls of well-connected bloggers and blog aggregators like the RPG Planet I'm running and similar sites like the RPGA, and forums like EN World, Dragonsfoot, ODD74, and so on.

RPG Planet

I think we have to do the work and link to other people's blogs.