I’m more concerned that deleted content lingers on remote instances after it is deleted.

I meant to say that allowing comments is a selling point or promotional aspect because it keeps users engaged and give them a reason to come back. They have a reason to revisit the blog, see new posts, and comment on old posts. Having run a message board for over 20 years, I’ve observed that when people visit without posting something back, the quicker traffic dries up to almost nothing.

It is. Without user interaction, it’s very difficult to get readers to come back and read subsequent articles.

I tried to find an instance of WriteFreely that I could join. I had no luck in my efforts. I’m test driving Plume now. It seems pretty basic, so I may discontinue using it.

The usenet was essentially public email without all the HTML baggage. You searched for a group that interested you on public news servers. You subscribed to it and immediately interacted with people who shared your interests. The groups had a moderator to keep things on track. Typically, moderation was not a problem and I didn’t even know who the moderator was. Deja news archived the old posts and you could follow old threads to know what had been written before. Eventually, spam overtook the groups and it was too much to avoid. There were pay services, but most ISP’s had a news server and you could just follow the public groups for free.

I do very little to entice subscribers to follow me and I manually delete old posts after I felt people had time to review them and comment. I don’t want 20 years of my life online. People grow and change over time. Despite that general tendency, I’ve grown followers on Pixelfed at a faster rate than I have on most Social media sites. One person said my posts were filling up his feed and that’s why he hadn’t followed my account. That’s another reason I feel that following someone should not dump everything into your main feed. Following someone should just make it easier to access their posts. It should force it to be seen.

My song playlists had themes if I listened to one. I’ve owned a lot of albums that were 50% great songs and 50% duds. I do listen to albums if I know the album is consistent throughout.

I do like the complete randomness of Mastodon, but I have a huge blocklist that probably ties up a lot of system resources in the background. Misskey is very interesting, but I feel that some of it is broken and some of it is not very intuitive (such as expanding a thread.)

My biggest problem with social media is that if I follow someone, I’m not interested in seeing everything that everyone posts in my feed. I want to be able to select the users separately and view their specific posts when I’m in the mood. I don’t want everything jumbled together. I usually don’t follow anyone and just click on their profile instead. That’s disheartening to the people who do post things that interest me. I’m looking forward to pixelfed introducing groups. Being old school in my tastes , I prefered the old usenet format better and using a feed reader. Spam (& google) ruined the old usenet format.