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

[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.