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I really like this, and I think the key is that you have to submit your own posts, so that there is engagement. I suggest having some kind of requirement that authors engage with comments. Otherwise it could turn into Twitter: someone posts material in an attempt to promote themselves (even if there's no attempt to sell anything) but they refuse to engage with most people. That's super boring, and there are other places to do that.

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I feel that if in general you want the authors to engage, I would ask the audience to post the comments on the author's blog (for those blogs that support comments).

In this specific case it's a bit trickier because you want authors to post their content, and this may or may not be in line with your goal, depending on whether you e.g. prioritise build another community (social network?) of people interested in blogging or reducing reliance on <big centralised websites>.

I would prefer reducing the comment fragmentation in this kind of a context.

Yeah the summaries and text only posts are meant to help with that.

It could be worth asking authors explicitly to engage with comments too. I’ll add that if it looks like people are only dropping links to promote.

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