Thanks--and yeah, it took a long time for the clue-by-four to hit me. That the people looking with fresh eyes were right about Dreamwidth comms being the more formal space, the space one hesitates to intrude upon, because they're really only used for events, promos, and presenting finished fanworks to a wider audience.
And, maybe more invisibly to Tumblr natives, they were also right to start with friending memes and finding users to subscribe to. It's a very Tumblr/Twitter approach, treating individual blogs and subscriptions as the fundamental unit of the public sphere, rather than LJ where they're spokes plugged into the hubs of communities. But it matches the current shape of Dreamwidth, where most of the freeform interaction takes place on individual blogs. Even though, yeah, as you said, Tumblr follows are impersonal, and Tumblr blogs are where drive-by public interactions take place, while Dreamwidth at least somewhat retains the norm that user journals are semi-private space.
Reblogging/retweeting is what enables that "individual blog as fundamental unit" approach, I think. It allows any account to be the vector for discovering posts from outside your immediate network, for boosting your work to a wider audience, and for curating and aggregating on a particular theme. But there's much more off-topic noise that way (more room to serve you ads as you scroll for what you really want) and it plays merry hell with audience and context (more engagement via outrage clickbait). I'm still not sure how I feel about it: yes, one-click curation and the potential for your work to reach a viral audience. On the other hand, curation replacing interaction, low signal-to-noise ratio, and the potential for your work to get dogpiled by a viral audience. :P
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And, maybe more invisibly to Tumblr natives, they were also right to start with friending memes and finding users to subscribe to. It's a very Tumblr/Twitter approach, treating individual blogs and subscriptions as the fundamental unit of the public sphere, rather than LJ where they're spokes plugged into the hubs of communities. But it matches the current shape of Dreamwidth, where most of the freeform interaction takes place on individual blogs. Even though, yeah, as you said, Tumblr follows are impersonal, and Tumblr blogs are where drive-by public interactions take place, while Dreamwidth at least somewhat retains the norm that user journals are semi-private space.
Reblogging/retweeting is what enables that "individual blog as fundamental unit" approach, I think. It allows any account to be the vector for discovering posts from outside your immediate network, for boosting your work to a wider audience, and for curating and aggregating on a particular theme. But there's much more off-topic noise that way (more room to serve you ads as you scroll for what you really want) and it plays merry hell with audience and context (more engagement via outrage clickbait). I'm still not sure how I feel about it: yes, one-click curation and the potential for your work to reach a viral audience. On the other hand, curation replacing interaction, low signal-to-noise ratio, and the potential for your work to get dogpiled by a viral audience. :P