237.

[peaked]

snowflake_challenge #11: In your own space, Interact with someone.

The most important person I interacted with was my cat. Waking up to her on my shoulder as the queen she is was definitely the best interaction I've had all morning. (Of course, since I'm not Lucille Bluth and do not have favourites, interacting with my other two cats was obviously the highlight of my morning, too… when they appear. They're busy with Official Cat Business.)

I've been having a lot of fun commenting around on this challenge and talking to and meeting new people! When Snowflake first started, I was hesitant to comment around on journals because I wasn't too sure if it was welcome. (Silly, I know, but I feel like this could be a collective fandom experience from time to time? I definitely know it's Anxiety Brain.) But I figured that if it wasn't welcome, people wouldn't be sharing links to their posts saying they've completed the challenge and welcoming comments. Did anyone else feel a little hesitation at first before taking the plunge and commenting around?

I've also been participating in rthstewart's 3 Sentence Ficathon! It's been so much fun slamming into comments with a few sentences to tell a story and it's been fantastic to see how others have been filling prompts, too. This is what I've been missing in fandom (I mentioned ficathons in one of my challenge responses and then here comes rthstewart with the answer!) Come join us! We're on the second post now, but you're more than welcome to go fill prompts from the first post.

I'm planning on spending some time replying to some comments today, dropping into some on posts, and maybe shooting my shot with a stranger via message. We'll see what happens!

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm not sure why they do it, but there's always a handful of people who post stuff, and link it, but you can't see it because it's friends-locked.

A larger number of people post things openly during Snowflake but go back a few days or weeks later and lock the posts. I figure those are the ones looking for new friends, but doing so very cautiously.

Generally if a blogs is friends only or uses a lot of locked or filtered posts, I don't read it. I can't post the lock dingbat and linking to locked posts just annoys everyone. Better to avoid it by not reading in the first place.

[peaked]

I guess it's to each their own in that instance and what people are comfortable with in a public space. I personally don't get it because I wrote my posts publicly for them to be public (and won't be locking my posts unless months down the line I wish to, which is a whole bundle of work in itself for someone as lazy as me). I wanted to interact with the challenge and community that way, so it makes sense to me to post publicly and keep them public for however long, but I also know not everyone wants to do that.

It'd be great if people indicated locked posts on the community challenge page, but I suppose that's to each their own as well. I can only engage with what I have access to (both content-wise and obviously literally) and that's what I engage with.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I've only seen a few people indicate that their posts and/or blog are friends-locked, in the actual Snowflake posts. More common is arriving at the blog to see a notice that it's Friends Only or whatever. Back up, try a different one.

I don't use the locking or filter functions much. Things I post are usually meant to be public. The main thing I do is, if there's a spam problem -- which happens once or twice a year -- then I friends-lock the comment function for a couple of weeks. By then they're usually gone and I can unlock it again.

People use these blogs for many different purposes. For some it's a social network or publishing platform, for others it's like a family calendar or even a diary. That's all fine.