Social Network Concept Using Blogs

11 Jul, 2023

Despite only rarely posting to a blog, personal websites are by far my preferred method of social networking. Personal blogs are censorship-resistant (which is certainly a double-edged sword), they avoid latching onto a behemoth app or service, they give the author absolute control over design and presentation, and they're time-tested and likely to continue to survive.

However, they're missing a few key features that popular social media websites and apps provide. While following a blog is simple (just add their RSS feed to your feed reader), I think a web-of-follows is needed. In addition to following a single person's feed, it should be simple for a blog author to publish a list of other blogs that they give their seal of approval to – and it should be similarly simple to follow every blog in that list (and add/remove blogs from your feed reader automatically as that list changes). With just a few small additions to blogs (defining the format for this list) and a few more changes to feed readers (recognizing these lists, refetching these lists, and then fetching new content from blogs) this is relatively easily achievable.

Another missing feature is replies. Sure, an author writing a blog post can include in the first paragraph a quote from someone else's article with a link, saying essentially "Here's a snippet and article that this post is in response to – but that's tough for a computer to recognize. Instead, an additional <meta> tag¹ should be introduced that allows the author to specify a URL that references that which they are replying to.

The beauty of both of these features is that they allow a social network similar to Reddit or Twitter to emerge. A feed reader can show the user:

1. A blog post by one of the people they directly follow
2. A blog post by any of the people within their "network" – blogs referenced by curated lists they've opted into
3. Any in-network replies to these posts
4. Any in-network replies to those replies

Really, the reply feature is key. The in-network feature is necessary to support the replies. Without the ability to follow someone's recommendations, we'd need to introduce either some kind of central coordination² so readers can find replies. Another alternative would be to notify the original author whenever a reply was posted (via email, via ActivityPub, etc), then have the original author reference replies on their site (in a comment section or similar). I see two main issues with this approach: ➀ it relies on manual intervention (in the case of email) or more features implemented by the blog posting platforms (in the case of ActivityPub), and ➁ it allows the original author full control over which replies to include. The first issue is of similar difficulty to implement as adding new curated blog lists and automatic follows, so I'll disregard that as an issue.

The second, though, discourages open discourse on the web: many authors very carefully curate views and opinions on their blogs and would not want to include any replies from people that directly oppose them. However, the ability to comment on, reply to, or otherwise reference a post (even if the author doesn't want you to) encourages discussion between otherwise interested parties.