everything continues to be a social action, unfortunately

[unknought]

On Tumblr, and on Twitter before that, I tried to avoid following people until I was reasonably confident that I would continue to want to follow them, because unfollowing people might make them unhappy (and I especially wanted to avoid a situation where I keep vacillating about whether I should follow someone, and they get a notification every time I follow them again, augh). That doesn't really seem like a feasible strategy here, because most of the people I would potentially be subscribing to also just got here, and I don't have any idea what their posts are going to be like. Looking at people's Tumblrs is pretty limited in what it tells me, since this is a different platform which encourages different patterns of use.

So right now I'm subscribing pretty indiscriminately and probably later I'm going to unsubscribe from a lot of people. Which isn't ideal, but seems better than the alternative of waiting for there to be an established community before I try to get involved myself.

Comments

[sigmaleph]

I am doing more or less the same, subscribing to people I hadn't followed previously on tumblr (my explicit reasoning about that was more about reinforcing the clustering of the new dreamwidth community, and making it easier to find any new resources shared about a new, unfamiliar website)

I... don't tend to worry too much about people minding that I unsubscribed to them. I *could*, i am an anxious person that worries a lot about all kinds of social interaction, but I don't. It helps that most websites do not notify people of unfollows so it feels less interaction-y.

also some internalised memes about how social media can become unpleasant if you don't carefully curate whose content you are subjecting yourself to and how 'follow/unfollow' is a statement about *content* and not about the person. this was probably more relevant on tumblr, where following someone also implied seeing ~everything they say in reply to someone else

[metagorgon]

for some reason a paid feature of DW is to know when people unfollow and similar disengagement actions.

[sigmaleph]

that sounds like a terrible idea but people can do what they want.

[pseudonym_loving_magpie]

I'm doing the same initially, but hadn't planned ahead about whether to unfollow.

[ambyr]

For what it’s worth, DW (like FB I guess) allows you to set up reading lists that are a filtered subset of who you’re subscribed to. So if you’re vacillating about whether or not to follow someone, you don’t have to subscribe and unsubscribe if you don’t want to, you can just shift them off your main reading filter, an action completely opaque to them. (I am heartless and cruel—or lazy, take your pick—and just unsubscribe if I find I’m not interested in someone’s content any more, but it is an option, and probably a good one if you think the uninteresting-to-you content is a temporary state, linked to some specific event or brief-lived enthusiasm.)

(Random local idly link-hopping through all the new people who’ve joined us, don’t mind me.)

[mathemagicalschema]

Yeah, one of the most common reasons for me to not follow a given person on tumblr is that their blog was too heavy on reblogs I wasn't interested in/duplicated too much content from other people I followed, which is much less likely to be an issue on DW!

FWIW, users with free accounts are not notified when you unsubscribe or revoke access to them; only paid accounts have the option. If you would like a way of following someone without their being notified, you can navigate to their journal, and in the navstrip at the top, click "Track Account" to have an email sent to you when they post. Less convenient, though. Ambyr's tip about reading page filters is a good one as well.

[thirqual]

👍