One of the issues Brendan Schlagel is encountering in his “networked communities” blogchain with Tom Critchlow is that approaches to "positive gatekeeping” likely won’t be the same across different types of communities. The sorts of communities that evolve, or are fostered, in and around blogs are not the same sorts of communities that arise in and around social media platforms.
It’s perhaps hard, for example, to take any direct lessons from something like Darius Kazemi’s approach to Mastodon via his Hometown fork and apply them to the (or a) blogosphere, because these forms do different things, for different reasons.
Social media, even in Hometown’s approach, is designed for networks, while blogs mostly have been designed for, or at least around, an individual. Many will generate certain kinds of communities in user comment areas, but few if any so far have generated any sort of community through the networking tools available (e.g. trackback, pingback, and, now, webmention).
There’s always been far more curation in the blogosphere than has tended to be the case in social media because of blogging’s focus on the individual blogger and how they did or did not want to engage in a wider community, whether on or off their own blog.
What, exactly, would a more internetworked blogosphere look like? What degree of internetworking even is possible, let alone desirable, in this format? It’s one thing to want to encourage people to respond and react to blog posts they’ve read by posting to their own blogs while pinging or mentioning the original post, leaving it to the latter to decide what, if anything to do in terms of displaying, or interacting with, these reactions, but is there more? Should there be more?
Addenda
- One thing of relevancy in terms of community-building and positive gatekeeping: I tried to ping/mention Schlagel’s post and was told my post here was spam.