Meta blogs
This evening I was perusing planet.lisp, a site that bills itself “as a meta blog that collects the contents of various Lisp-related blogs.” Which got me thinking about social networks, taxonomies of content, the indieweb and micro.blog…also emoji.
I wonder if the indieweb/micro.blog equivalent of hashtags are meta blogs — feeds of thematically grouped posts? Of course, not every post would fall into a single or the same category. Enter @manton’s groovy use of emoji.
Micro.blog is experimenting with using emoji to organize thematically similar content. Post about a book, include a book emoji 📚, post about football, there is an emoji for that 🏈. You get the idea. Right now there are only a limited number of these organizing emoji and they’re all defined by the service. Users can’t make their own. It is a curious hybrid of twitter-style hasthags and reddit’s r/subreddits.
A meta blog is a wee bit different from this, though, in that you can subscribe directly to the meta blog’s feed. Ya can’t do that with micro.blog’s emoji groups — at least not yet. I’m curious if folks could use the existing infrastructure of the indieweb (particularly webmentions) to build a network of thematic meta blogs?
My thinking is that you’d post a post as you normally post a post, but also include a call back link to send a webmention to whatever meta blog you’d like your post to appear in. When said meta blog received that webmention, it would then slurp up your post and add it to its feed. I think a system like this would be groovy, in that it could help connect more folks to each other by providing a distributed backbone to the indieweb. This layer of meta blogs could also work as a sort of caching mechanism if these meta blogs actually copied (but linked back to) the original posts. This way, even if that post disappeared for some reason it could live on in the meta blog-o-sphere…granted that is a whole other can of worms because then you’d need to support a way to let folks delete posts from meta blogs…so maybe not 🤷♂️
I haven’t thought through all the nitty gritty details of this setup yet, but thought I’d float the idea and see if anyone had any thoughts about it, or was interested in working to build a proof of concept with me.
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