Is it just me or does blygger feel like it successfully occupies the meso-scale space between blogs and microblogs? Not just in word count but in formality of structure?

Ie it’s not just about length anymore, though blygs do seem to land for me in the 1500-2000 character/200-300 word range. It’s about notebook-type structure and intent on the one hand, and the effect of public versioning which simultaneously encourages seriousness and informality. The perpetual beta vibe.

The optionality of headlines is an important feature I think.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

Yeah I think it's working pretty well for that. Which I'm liking a lot as it's nice to have an informal mesoblogging space. Also cause twitter is useless for discussions. It'll be very interesting to see how this scales.

Research says community spaces is part protocol/interface doesn't and part founder effects (which are quite powerful and persistent). Same software, wildly different cultures: a big Reddit study (35k founders, ~8.6k subreddits) found founders' personalities, inferred from their writing, predicted how long a community lasted and how active it got. Correlational, but the platform was basically held constant. Mastodon's the same: near-identical code, with admins ranging from "rules emerge from the community" to "my server, my values."

The persistence is the surprising part. Newcomers pick up local norms before their first comment. The same person writes civilly in one political subreddit and aggressively in another. Subreddits flooded with newcomers after becoming defaults mostly kept their character. Later arrivals read the room and conform, and the ones who don't fit drift off.

The interface still matters as incentives: showing rules to newcomers bumps compliance, and early upvotes snowball. But cloning a network's UI is easy and cloning its vibe isn't. For a new space, the big early choices are who you invite first, what you visibly celebrate, and who enforces the norms.