What is the Fediverse analogue of blogs? Specifically, which facet of the Fediverse provides the features that blogging used to provide:
- long-form posts (without character limits)
- embedded images and other media
- perma-links and RSS / Atom feeds and other features so that content remains linkable into the future
- commenting and engagement and associated moderation features
- re-blogging and sharing
- community: blogs self-organising into interest areas, pollinate other blogs, link to each other, direct their readers towards each other, etc.
And, most importantly, the ability to create, grow and nurture a following or audience?
I'm on Mastodon and on Lemmy and, in my opinion, neither of those quite hit the mark.
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Masto is too close to bird-site: character limits (nearly always), shoddy threads, and the fact that one is invariably just firing toots into a torrential onslaught of public toots unless one actually already has a following. Hash-tags and other topic-related features seem ill used, throughout, so discoverability is pretty low unless you already have a platform. Engaging with others in replies earns a lot of boosts and favourites but zero followers no matter how well your reply-toots are received.
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Lemmy is too close to anotheR site. It's great for being a refuge from that and replacement for that but really not a blogging platform.
I'm happy with both of the above for what they do. I really like the discourse in Masto's reply threads, actually, but it seems useless for actually building a following for one's self. I'm rather new to Lemmy but I like what I'm finding, so far.
The solution here with the greatest reach may honestly be to just make a simple html website and post your content to other federated services that have wider user bases. Like, yeah, someone might be able to follow your posts through write-as, but I feel like cross posting to Lemmy and Mastodon will probably get more eyes on your work.
Also, from my thinking, blogs are needless and were largely a step on the way to web 2.0's service based model. If you simply have something to say and want to get it out there, you don't really necessarily need a complex system with a database to do it.
Bring back personal pages.