moitt asked:
morning wips! i wanna get involved with the communities rollout! i've submitted a couple of them for review already. however, even for someone like me that is v ready for it, it's hard to engage with communities as a concept because it's not clear what they'll be, not possible to browse existing ones, and there's no info about how they might look or feel like to use. could we have a list of communities that are already happening (even if we can't access them yet), a walkthrough of how communities look or some other descriptive resource? the current info about communities isn't telling very much. these suggestions are made with positive enthusiasm - i WANT to get hype - but it feels v much like we're fumbling in the dark/contributing to something that we don't get to see atm and i think some clarity would help. kis kis kis !!
Answer: Hi there, @moitt!
Thank you for these. All great, fair questions!
And we are happy to answer them. Admittedly, we are fumbling in the dark a little, you might say—that is why it’s still an experiment. We have our own ideas for how Communities could work, but really, we want to build it based on what people actually do with it. This is why the current functionality is fairly simple and limited. We’ve wanted to see what feedback we get and to understand what people ask for and expect—rather than spending a long time building something that may be unappealing to the people we hope will use it (we’ve made that mistake many times in the past!) You can see a little bit of that dialogue in the Feedback community.
To your point about seeing communities—right now, we’re working on ways of integrating public communities into existing feeds, search, tagged pages, etc., so that they can be discovered by people who aren’t in any yet (which is most people on Tumblr!) We hope that by seeing other people use it, you’ll get a better explanation than anything we could try to provide—because every community is doing things in their own interestingly unique way right now. We don’t want to be prescriptive about how they should be used.
By the way, the same is true with how blogs work on Tumblr—we don’t tell you how to blog. Instead, we hope you try to figure out your own way of blogging by seeing how others behave on the platform.
We hope that helps address at least some of your queries. We would also advise that you have a little look at this handy Help Center explainer into Communities. Above all, we hope y’all like it.
Stay tuned!
