As I was going through the comments on the previous post regarding the idea of a community blogging platform, I realized that by the time I finish responding to each one I would have written the equivalent of another post, so I apologize to those who took time to comment for not crafting personal responses, but I think folks brought up good points that deserve to be addressed as part of the greater conversation.

The response seems to be generally positive, which makes me happy. This was an off-the-cuff musing in the time of Blaugust so a lot of “details” were left untouched since I thought the idea would get blasted to hell, but people seem to like the concept. I guess that means we can take a longer look at some of the finer points, at least as a thought experiment.

The goal

• Take the burden of site operation off off the shoulders of authors.
• Make posts adjacent to other posts, reducing time-to-discover new voices.
• Create a shared vehicle where authors have a stake in “raising the tide”.
• It’s not a business.

I thought of this idea in response to the shuttering of Tipa’s “Daily Blogroll” and the fact that we’re in the middle of the Blaugust blogging event. Both of these focus on promotion and discovery of bloggers, most of whom operate in a silo of their own design. Many bloggers own their own domain and pay for website hosting, and have to pay the bills for these regardless of how often they post. Often times this can lead to people thinking about getting out of the blogging game because they can’t justify spending the money on services they’re not using as often as they feel they should, or just because they don’t want to keep maintaining a presence.

The community platform idea was mainly a way to assuage these feelings, and a way to keep bloggers in the game when blogging isn’t as popular as it once was…basically, a different approach to the same goal that Blaugust has. It would give authors a place where they can just show up and write, whenever they want to, with no obligation. It would put old-hand bloggers alongside new-to-the-craft bloggers so that a “rising tide can lift all boats” by cross-promoting similar topics to visitors who might otherwise miss out on posts by voices they hadn’t discovered. It would also de-silo authors; by providing a shared platform, promoting oneself would also be promoting others, raising the visibility of our brothers and sisters as opposed to everyone going it alone.

It’s not envisioned to be a business. It wouldn’t be modeled after existing news outlets, and it wouldn’t be a platform to boost the brand of the platform itself. It would be a place for writers to write without having to worry about the technical crap that comes with managing one’s own site.

I expect that there would be a rather steep inception phase, as duties fall to one or a small number of people, both technical duties and financial duties, and that means that whomever would take on the project would need to do so with the express understanding that they’re doing it for the love of the community, not for a paycheck, perks, or grand ambition. Eventually, with the community working together for the good of the community, I would be confident that rough spots would be ironed out, a rhythm achieved, and the site could provide a comfortable, no-pressure home for mutually beneficial blogging.

So now, let’s address some questions. These are my thoughts only, and some might seem to be overly simplistic or idealistic, but this is just a thought experiment. Please, continue to offer your insights in the comments, and thank you for your interest in this project.

Who’s in charge?

• Someone’s name has to be on the domain registration and hosting.
• Someone has to set up the site and manage configuration.
• Several people could be tasked with maintaining the site.
• Someone has to take on the role of enforcer to maintain the community standards and deal with participant concerns and grievances.

This is a hard one to nail down, and it has to be the first point of order to nail down. Ideally, it would be someone who really believes in the project, as they will need to register the domain and set up hosting and the site package. Once up and running, several people could take roles (even casual ones) in keeping the site running, but the buck would still stop with the principal because the project couldn’t afford for no one stepping up to do the real heavy lifting that would undoubtedly be required.

I think the hardest part would be the steering of the community. If someone misbehaves or abuses the site, they would need to be removed. If two or more members have interpersonal issues, these would need to be addressed. Ideally conflict could be pre-resolved by having clear do’s and don’ts baked into the site that participants would have to agree to, but stuff happens, and someone would need to be on-hand to deal with that stuff.

Technical details

• Domain and hosting would need to be acquired.
• A platform would need to be selected; Advocate against a homebrew solution.
• Individual accounts are a must, but what about media and storage?
• Site appearance and branding.

Domain acquisition is straightforward. Hosting is hit or miss, really; I like my current host (IONOS) but other people have their own experiences to contribute. Media storage would be of a particular concern as having many people uploading media would fill up a quota faster than an individual would, so options such as S3 might need to be thrown into the mix which adds cost. The site would also need to keep media silo’d by user, and I don’t know if or how that’s an option.

Personally, I’d advocate against a custom platform mainly because of the time, questions of ownership and rights (it would need to be developers and offered as FOSS), feature set and security, of course. As I had originally concepted the project to be simple, an off-the-shelf, click to deploy solution offered by a hosting company would be easiest, most flexible, supported, and “battle-tested”. I use WordPress here, and have been thinking about operations in terms of WordPress, but I know some people hate WordPress, so other suggestions would be welcome.

As for the look and feel, I think that most traffic would be driven direct to individual posts, so the homepage isn’t as important today as it once was. I personally like the “magazine” format, like the one I use for this site’s homepage, but there are other options. As MassivelyOP was mentioned in the comments, that format is certainly an option as well.

I’d say that categories and tags can be open to all to create as needed. Page templates would have to be standardized, unless someone could/wanted to create one, but I’d suggest it be done for the good of the community and not as an author-specific feature.

Project scope

• “Craft fair” model.
• Participation frequency should not determine availability.
• Theme or topical focus would be on gaming and tech, but not limited.
• Community guidelines need to be agreed upon.

I didn’t envision this as a second job; instead, I considered it to be a “craft fair” where someone holds the deed to a plot of land, and every author is renting a booth from which they can sell whatever they want: soap, jewelry, 3D printed toys, or junk from their garage.

Since creating an account doesn’t take up space, participation frequency would not be mandated. This helps people who want to blog, but not every day, or who are questioning whether they want to maintain a blog at their current output rate. Frequent posters should also not be penalized. There is no minimum or maximum output quotas (assuming we can handle the media storage question).

I assume that since the people who responded to this post are generally video game and/or tech bloggers that this would be the theme of the site, but just as many individual sites that have a similar main theme, this doesn’t prevent authors from writing about pets, board games, cars, or personal experiences. The site would allow any topic that falls within the agreed-upon community guidelines.

Community guidelines would be the difficult part to hash out because, for example, some people write about AI and some people loathe AI. How do we handle this when the site is designed to have no preference but the participants do? I would advocate for a permissive charter, offering boilerplate footers for every post such as “the views of other authors on this site are not necessarily shared by me” if it would help, but aside from absolutely verboten topics, including someone is going to eventually exclude someone else, so I think that’s something that anyone thinking of participating would have to understand and accept and be held to account over.

Funding & Promotion

• An individual would need to lay out the initial cost of setting things up (domain, hosting, storage) and be willing to go it alone if necessary.
• Patreon for optional supporter; not for participation.
• The site is agnostic; authors are responsible for their own promotion.
• Inquiries to the site for promotion are to be discussed.

There needs to be some source of income to at least pay for the domain, hosting, and media storage, and their renewal. As many of us operate our own sites already, we know how much this costs; personally, I don’t think it’s onerous to set up, but I’d advocate for a Patreon to allow participants and/or readers to support the project if they want, and only the project. All money collected would go towards renewing the domain/host and paying for storage. In the event of a dissolution of the project, any left-over money would be donated to a charity of the community’s choosing, ideally one that fits the tone of the site.

While I like the idea of the site being an entity that could help promote participants, I think that such a thing would be a full time job that no one has time for. As such, participants would still promote their content through their usual channels. The site would, however, include sidebar and footer content in every post recommending other authors from the site based on things like categories, tags, and recency.

As it was mentioned in the comments, if the site did get recognized by companies who wanted to offer promotional materials, that’s a topic that would have to be agreed upon in the project charter. Personally, I think that the site itself should deflect all promotions; if anything, the site would respond to inquiries by asking the promoter to direct their request to a specific participant of the site that they feel would best fit their product. I wouldn’t want the site or site operators to be the arbiter of who gets perks and who doesn’t; that’s not the goal of the project, so the best way to ensure that it doesn’t happen is to not deal with such inquiries or to ask the promoter to refine their focus within the bounds of the site.

Participation

• No minimum, no maximum participation needed.
• Participants can discuss the site’s operation and direction (sadly, it sounds like a Discord would be needed).
• Grievances would need to be raised with specific and desired outcomes stated.
• Posts can be published on a schedule decided by the authors themselves.
• Initial soft-cap on participants, only to ensure that the model can work.

As stated, I don’t think there would be a minimum or maximum participation level required. Part of the idea behind this project would be to allow occasional posters a place where they know they can post, without feeling pressured to do so by costly hosting fees.

There would certainly need to be a place for participants to discuss the operation and direction of the site, and I think the best place would be a Discord; the alternative would be a forum, and it would be easier to spin up a Discord server with forums than to implement a hosted forum in 202X. It would also keep a lot of the documentation out of the site proper, and offer a kind of “break room” for participants to visit can chat, help or collaborate. New participants would need to join, but no one would need to be constantly present in Discord except when the community needs to discuss certain topics that affect the community as a whole.

Any grievances, personal or technical, would have to be framed with specific and desired outcomes stated. I think a lot of issues in communities are raised by people who want someone in authority to “handle it”, putting the burden on someone else to figure out what will make the aggrieved party happy. It would be up to the aggrieved party to clearly state their issue and what they want to see happen. Ideally, if the issue is interpersonal, if someone has a problem with another author’s topic, and there is no proscribed guideline in the charter, the person(s) tasked with dealing with situations would require a mediation session, live or asynchronous, to see if the participants can’t come to a mutually beneficial agreement that allows all parties to continue to engage with the site. I know this might sound particularly corporate, and the idea of a “face to face” resolution session might make people think it’s an ice-out tactic designed to silence complaints, but it’s not; the site is meant to give people platforms without dictating what those platforms can be, and participation requires agreement that someone one column over might say something about something that you disagree with.

Authors would be in charge of publishing on their own schedule. If the site relied on promoting all participants, then I think it would need to get everyone to agree that not all posts can be pushed out during the “golden hour”, and some rotating release would need to be set and automated so that everyone has a chance to publish during peak hours. Since authors are responsible for the promotion of their content, they should be allowed to publish whenever.

Finally, I think that a project like this would need to start with a handful of “ground floor” participants during a “proof of concept” phase. While this wouldn’t be a hard-and-fast number, I’d think that a specific registration date deadline would be appropriate, after which registrations would be closed for a while as the site shakes out. Then, if possible, registration could open again for everyone, all the time, or again for a set window. It would depend on the tech stack being able to handle the traffic, the responsiveness of the site as more people publish and visit, and the cost of increased site use.