I’ve spent the past week experimenting a bit with a more active process of seeking out new blogs and have been pondering writing a post about the process as well how I’m logging discoveries. First though, I’ll share this post because it prompted me to actually start writing the post I’d been thinking about. Discovered via BearBlog’s Discovery page, it was just a brief recounting of several real-life experiences of social discovery that began with this late night encounter on a city street:
you’re not the only weirdo | hanki.dev:
I met most of my friends because I spotted them doing “weird” things. Like lying on the sidewalk at night.
I was walking, spotted a person on the ground in the middle of the city, went up to check if they’re alive. I asked “Hey, are you okay?”.
Dude said “Yeah, I’m great”.
So I asked “Why are you lying on the sidewalk?”.
“I’m stargazing” he said.
It was a simple, sweet post and I loved every word.
Blogs, not people
I’ll start by noting something really obvious which is that micro.blog, Mastodon and all social media have timelines of posts that begin with an avatar and username. It’s a seemingly small thing really, but it immediately sets the feel of the timeline to “social media feed”. It’s a sharp contrast to a blogroll or a postroll which is just the title of blogs or longer form posts.
One is an immediate, steady inundation of photos, ideas, opinions, etc where I am encouraged to just scroll and scroll and scroll. It’s like a conveyor belt. Even the non-algorithm timelines like Mastodon and micro.blog are still timelines built for scrolling through short posts.
The other is just a list of links on a page. When I click a link of an interesting title I’m taken off to an entirely different page with its own character, design, text and/or images. I’ve reached a destination. A may just read one post or I may spend hours exploring an archive of posts.
I decided to shift away from the never ending stream of conversations within the homogeneous visual feeds and, instead, to hop from blog to blog, enjoying the diversity of authors and visual presentations of pages. I’ve reduced my time on my micro.blog and Mastodon, instead using the above mentioned Discovery page on BearBlog and The Blogroll Club. First, a note of appreciation for BearBlog’s Discovery page. It’s a vast improvement over micro.blog’s poor attempt. The BearBlog Discovery page has three options: Trending, Most Recent and Search.
Trending is based upon an algorithm that uses a mix of time since post and upvote/appreciate button at the bottom of every BearBlog post. The algorithm/formula is explained at the bottom of the Discovery page, not that I understand it. It seems anyone (with or without an account) can tap upvote button on a post. In other words, it’s curated by everyone rather than the 1 person curation of micro.blog. The human curation of the micro.blog Discovery feed is touted as a positive feature but no, it just means that the feed is updated infrequently and reflects the biases of one person’s preferences. It’s truly a terrible implementation.
The “Most Recent” feed is self explanatory and I’ve had a good experience with that as well. Search of BearBlogs provides far more and better results than search in the micro.blog discovery feed which is so incomplete as to be functionally useless in terms of finding posts by keyword content.
Curating
As I’m finding blogs I tend to want to do something with those that I really like. In the past I would have likely added a blog to my RSS reader but I’ve found that doesn’t work well for me. I tend to use RSS for higher volume news sites and I’ve found that blogs get lost in it. For a long time I thought I could manage by having a folder for blog feeds but I use an RSS reader to skim news headlines. It’s a different mental mode for me. RSS isn’t about taking the time to enjoy the personality of a blog, it’s about getting the news of the day from larger sites with a variety of professional journalists.
For the moment my new process for curating blogs of interest is simple and relies on Safari’s tab groups which feel a bit more dynamic than a folder of bookmarks would. Once I’ve clicked through to a blog I’ll explore and read. If it’s a blog I want to return to and/or add to my blogroll I’ll pop it into the Blog Tab Group. Unlike RSS or a social timeline the point here is to go slow. It’s like a visit to a new acquaintance’s home or garden, there’s no rush, no commitment.
Discovery and Communities
In addition to the BearBlog Discovery page I’m also keeping a tab open for The Blogroll Club and iWebThings Hub. This little bit of exploration reminds me of my daily blog explorations in the early 2000’s. It’s obvious after these past few days that my habit of reading the Mastodon and Micro.blog timelines has been far too limiting. Also, perhaps worth noting is the different personality or culture of different blog communities. For example, after a few days browsing the BearBlog directory I’m noting that blogs there tend to be very personal, long form posts with few photos. Almost no short posts which tend to dominate micro.blog. I’ve yet to browse through Scribbles but I’m going to guess it will likely mirror micro.blog as it’s timeline seems to mirror the same design. Just a quick glance this morning and I doubt I’ll visit again. The discovery page is just one page with a limited number of posts from a small group of users. Pika doesn’t have a discovery page that I see. Write.as has a discovery page that seems useful. I’ve not spent much time there yet so I can’t say much about what’s being shared or the community, but visually, well, it’s very plain. It seems to be that the design is very much meant to mimic a piece of paper.
So it would seem that the various hosting services are also, to some degree, forming “communities” by which I mean certain shared design and content traits within their network. I’m hoping to spend a good bit of my time the next few weeks diving deeper into the process of exploration. I can see that Bear.blog makes it fairly easy and I suspect that I’ll enjoy that space more than the others. But I’m also curious about what other communities or networks I might find.