Community, Not “Engagement”

Mar 15 2025

In 2022 I was pretty enthusiastic about using webmentions and services like commentpara.de etc to add "smol web"-style interactivity to the blog. Reading back I don't understand any of it. I don't know why I thought it would work. Obviously it's too much friction for anyone to actually want to use. I added the webmentions link back to the nav bar as a lark, but to use them you need to:

1. Write something on your own blog with a link to something I wrote.
2. Copy the URL for the post you want to mention
3. Click the "webmention" link
4. Paste the URL into the "target URL" field
5. Paste your own URL into the "source URL" field
6. Click the button

No one's gonna do all that. I don't know why I ever thought anyone would. I think I knew it was impractical, but I was so preoccupied with getting it to technically work that I didn't care?

For webmentions to work it needs to be seamless, and I don't think there's a single blogging platform that does seamless, automatic webmentions except maybe wordpress, if you have the right plugin, because there's a plugin for everything; but my commitment to not using wordpress is stronger now than ever.

In how to @ someone on bear, maxie talks about a way to ping other people on this platform when you link to them:

first; in your post - make their name a clickable link that directs to their blog. (you probably have already done this, it is basic blogger etiquette)

then; after publishing, click on said link.

under the 'referrers' section in their analytics page, they will see where traffic is being sent from from - and one of those links will now be the post in reference.

It's neat that this works, and I'll try to remember to click the link and ping any bear blog I link to, but unfortunately the "referrers" section is only available to bloggers with a paid account. With a free account, I only have access to the basic numbers:

I'm not a fan of numbers, so I usually have these disabled, but I turned them back on to make sure nothing had changed in my absence. It's kind of a shame, this would definitely be low-friction enough to facilitate good communication. Not just on Bear, but any website or blog platform. You might get a bunch of notifications from people just sharing links without comment, but hopefully there's a way to filter out domains so you could only see references from non-social-media sources.

Awhile back I wrote a post where I ask what's the right amount of interactivity? where I talk about the extremely convoluted mess of third-party services I used to enable replies, and idkwtf I was thinking. I knew how much trouble I have with friction, the idea that I would feel like copy/pasting a bit of custom code and changing the URL in every post is ridiculous. I'm too embarrassed to see how quickly I gave up on this but I'm willing to bet it's less than a week. I don't know if anyone ever used it. It was inconvenient for all parties involved.

I do stand by what I said about comment sections, though. If anything I've become more anti-reply in general. Not that I don't want feedback, but I think having a dedicated "reply section" for every post is the wrong way to go about it.

I think comment sections are bad because it prompts people to post things that are poorly thought out and often unhelpful. They encourage hot takes and saying something just to say it. In my opinion, if you have something to say about something I write, the best way to express it is in an email or, even better, in your own blog post. I think crafting a careful response for your own audience is the best way to engage with other people's ideas. You're more likely to be thoughtful about your own ideas and wording. You're less likely to contribute noise just because you're expected to.¹

But the original author being notified of the response would be nice. I'm sure as heck more likely to want to read what someone says on their own blog.² You could email the author and say "Hey, I wrote a response to you here [link]" but that can come across as a little overly familiar. Not that I would mind if anyone did this, but I understand why someone might be hesitant.

I think being able to see referrers³ might be the best solution for these kinds of cross-blog conversations, but there's no universal way to do this. I actually think the humble pingback would work fine for this, and I thought spam wouldn't be an issue as long as you didn't automatically publish the pingbacks below the article; after all, what would be the point if the author is the only one who sees it? But apparently pingbacks have a design flaw that allows them to be used by botnets for DDOS attacks, and in practice that's 100% what they're used for. Webmentions were supposed to be a more secure replacement for pingbacks, but no one uses or supports them. Oh well!

I'm trying out a service that I've heard can be useful for this, a sort of generic referral finder, but so far it hasn't been. If I get any results I'll report back.

"Comfort Bloggers"

There's been a lot of discussion lately around the idea of "comfort bloggers" and the problem of a handful of writers consistently appearing in the Trending Feed. I don't really have a strong opinion about this, other than to reiterate two truisms: (1) algorithmic feeds are always going to be less interesting, and (2) "firehose" feeds are always going to require more effort. I think the effort is worth it, though. The trending feed is generally going to contain posts that are more broadly appealing. For an audience largely composed of people who found the site via "hacker news", this means posts about tech in general, with a focus on blogging itself. Nerds like to blog about blogging.⁴ We've all seen the XKCDcomic:

rakhim.org

The non-technical posts are likely to be vague business inspo or fairly impersonal writing from people who want to talk about themselves and their experiences but don't have a lot of practice.⁵ Which is great! Starting with what you know and practicing is the only way to find your voice, and I encourage people to write whatever they want. But when a large number of writers are in roughly the same experiential boat, and they all relate to each other, they tend to upvote each other. It can become a self-reinforcing ad hoc "house style". There's nothing you can really do about it but wait for a more diverse pool of writers.

But really, the firehose (Most Recent feed) is always going to be the place to find the most diverse range of interesting posts. It has three main problems, and some people may not realize they're contributing to these problems. I will offer my advice:

1. People who don't specify their language

The feed lets you filter posts so you only see ones that appear in your language, but not everyone specifies the language of their posts. You can set a default by going to bearblog.dev/[you]/dashboard/settings. If you're multilingual, you can also set the language on a post-by-post basis! In the attributes section (above the post box, separated by a horizontal line) add a line that says lang: xx where xx is one of the two- or four-letter language codes. This will help declutter the feed for people who can't read the language you're writing in.

2. People who make their site structure discoverable

If you're setting up your blog, and you want to create a bunch of pages for books you like, music you're into, sites you recommend, etc., awesome! But you should set the posts to not be discoverable, so you're not spamming the feed with a bunch of pages with nothing on them. You also use the attribute section for this:

If you haven't before, try clicking the little arrow next to "attributes" and seeing all of the options a post can have. Many of them are useful!

3. People who post obviously AI-generated slop

Do not do this.

Reading Tips

Check the "recent posts" page often. Look at it more than the trending page. Look for stuff outside your normal wheelhouse. Click on titles that aren't engagement bait. Make good use of the account filters. I have 49 blogs hidden and the list is growing all the time. This is only saved locally in your browser, so if you use bear on more than one device (a PC and a phone, for example) I recommend copying and pasting the list into an unlisted page, to help keep it synchronized. With a little basic curation, the firehose can be a great place to discover stuff you didn't even know you like 🦝

#bearblog #correspondence #internet #meta #tech