The First Stab at the IndieWeb Interaction Social Norms

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Well, prompted from Tracy's reply to my blog commenting point, I have tried to think about about the current social norms around the blogs, how different communities do it and what kind of interaction do I want.

And since I am not the best person to as about the right social norms - as many teachers through primary and high school will attest, I figured out that I could get some outside perspective. So I asked about the specific situation in the last Galactic Homebrew Club.

I formulated the question like this: If you would suddenly get 50 webmentions on different posts in your blog. And you would see that one person went through your archive and left comments, how would you feel?

I think the first revealing thing was, that the first comment was sort of a question statement about it being a spam. Like they have never experienced something like this happening. I mean, I did not get it with comments, but I had people liking my stories on AO3 and you could tell they went and read through most if not all my stories in particular fandom.

But I guess this only happens in some of the communities, and nobody that was on the call at the time is a part of internet community, where this was normal?

But there were some points, that were raised beside this, so I though I would note them down with my comments.

The first point was, that people would be perplexed about getting that many webmentions. So I would guess that it is just not done currently.

The second point was, that if you just want to show appreciation for the person's writing, then it might be better to simply do it on one post or write the email saying the same thing.

The example of email would be something like: "I appreciate you writing. I specifically liked your post X." Or something like this.

Which I guess, if this would be the main motivation, then this would be considered a normal way of interaction. And I guess, if showing the appreciation for somebody's writing is the main goal, this is actually a great idea.

But maybe I also see blogging as the way to have a topical discussions, that are both asynchronous and divergent. I mean, reading something could inspire a blog post. Maybe reading somebody's blog can make one person think about multiple topics. Or maybe there is a commentary, that can show the same topic from a different perspective. I don't really see how this would be done this way.

Sometimes the blog posts are also just notes to myself. Or to help me think. While I do send webmentions, I don't expect people to actually read them?

But if I don't have anything to add, or I just enjoyed the writing and it did not make me rethink some stance, I am probably going to be stealing this suggestion.

The third point is, that some people have the urge to reply to all their webmentions.

I was hopping that nobody would mention anything in this direction. Because it is a lot easier to reply to somebody or use their link in the post and send a webmention to it, if you are sure that this will not be a negative experience for them. And creating an obligation like this... does sound like a negative experience. I mean, there is a reason why for some people, to many messages in the email is stressful.

But I don't have a good solution for this. How to create a social norms, where this would not be a burden, is an very interesting question, for which I do not have an answer.

I was toying with the idea, of training myself away from feeling weird by all the commenting. But I guess I am not going to do this, since I could never be sure, if this would be welcome.

The last point was to just use the social media instinct. Told in this very sure voice, that makes it clear that everybody has these instincts. So I don't think I voiced at the time, that I have no idea what this even means. *sweetdrop*

Thanking the interaction on the web, not just social media, my instincts are trained by AO3, Tumblr and passively consuming Reddit. I was blocked on Twitter before I even started really posting on it, and I was forced to use Facebook for school, so I only used it for school. There were some forums use, but this was primary school, so I don't really remember the norms on it.

If you read the Tracy's reply, that made me think more about it, she mentions the difference between Facebook and Instagram vs. Twitter. Indicating that these general social norms are not really uniform as some people would expect.

And then in my reading, I come across the post, arguing that different subreddits have different cultures. I also apparently it is not alright to comment on the Instagram post from last month, but it is perfectly normal to comment on the decade only story on AO3. And posts on Tumblr making jokes about new Twitter and Reddit users make it very clear, that this cultures are not the same. I think I also read somewhere, how Twitter users that came to Mastodon also caused some culture clash? Not sure about this, my memory is not 100% reliable.

So if this would be Tumblr, then I could now tag the people that participated in the discussion, to ask them if I correctly summarised the points we talked about. So James, Jo, Kevin, and Sven, did I summarised the conversation correctly? Is there anything you would add? Did I forget anything.

Because using my Tumblr instinct, this would be normal. Since I don't think there is an IndieWeb way to check, if we are mutuals. Probably not, but since we all had this conversation, I think it is fair game.

Is this something, that is acceptable in the current IndieWeb? Is this something we want to be acceptable in the IndieWeb?

Also, do we want to have a conversation about this, or do we just let the status quo dictate this?

I think in one of the IndieWeb Camps that I attended, there was a comment that there is not a lot of interaction on the IndieWeb. Might have been Berlin one, since this was where James started the game of Tic Tac Toe on his site and we had the conversation about how to use webmentions more creatively. But I am not 100% sure.

If we want to increase this, then it would be a good thing to have a conversation about what is acceptable and also what is not.

So anybody else willing to chip in with their own thinking about this topic?

Also Tracy, thank you for reminding me of different post types. I don't use them, so I forgot about them. Because they make this entire situation even more complicated.