This post was originally a note on substack.
THE WEEKLY OSR BLOGROLL
If you have a podcasts, mailing list or blog related to old school (or old school adjacent) TTRPGs please post on the r/osr blogroll linked below, and have a look at other links shared as comments on that post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/15jgtd7/weekly_osr_vlogblogroll_round_up/
Back in December 2019 I shared a post to r/osr in an attempt to give OSR blogs a regular home following the demise of Google Plus. I tried to post it every week, but I started to slack off… fortunately the mantle was taken up by Shuttered Room and later Xaosseed.
My goal would be that this would become an official, regular feature of the sub and would be regular meeting point for OSR bloggers far and wide. That dream was partially fulfilled when the mods at the sub set it up as an automated post every week. However, that decision was not well received, and many regular posters objected, leading to some debate concerning its purpose.
I’m not really interested in that discussion, but I have seen the blogroll fall in popularity. So: I’d like to take up some of the responsibility for promoting this cool community resource again.
The death of google plus and the curious state of Twitter tells us that TTRPGs need a more complex, more connected ecology of platforms rather than discrete, molecular outposts. I’m interested to hear what platforms you are most comfortable in (outside of this one) and to think how we can look at strengthening those connections. In the meantime, please share far and wide; post your blogs, newsletters and podcasts and lets help this niche sector of the hobby thrive!
Great! I keep forgetting to engage on Reddit more. My Twitter referrals are way down and everyone seems scattered to the four winds.
ReplyDeleteReddit remains a substantial driver of traffic for me, with twitter and other peoples newsletters being two other big one. I think the dispersed, cumulative impact of being on the blogroll of other folks blogs is bigger than one might think but hard to get a good measure on. Discord and Mastodon are two others I regularly share my links on but I cannot pick them out in the stats.
ReplyDeleteI do know from periods where I've been offline that if I don't go about posting my links, I lose ~1/3 of traffic. So 2/3 is blogrolls or people who have me saved to favorites - and for the extra 1/3 I have no idea which particular channel is effective alas.
May I ask what you're using to monitor traffic? I've used the built in blogger tools as well as Google Console, and they give confusingly different pictures.
DeleteThe only information I can be assured of:
- a large volume of traffic comes from other blogs- particularly Throne of Salt and Goblin punch, because Dan and Arnold (respectively) do me the kindness of including me in their blogroll. This is one of the reasons I do my best to keep my blogroll up to date
- I'm still getting a huge amount of hits from Vietnam. Tinfoil hat alert: I honestly believe this to be the result of government surveillance! Not because my blog is interesting politically, but just because it was originally made in Vietnam (where the legal status of blogs is... confusing)
Very, very delayed response, apologies - I just use the in built blogger tools - the google console stuff I find more trouble than it is worth. My traffic comes in off the blogroll, off others blogs, off twitter and bluesky now, and more recently off two aggregators that were set up - Sly Flourish's TTRPG blog roll and TTRPG network on Lemmy - it is all a bunch of small streams feeding in; the mastodon links do not show up but I am pretty sure they are in there somewhere.
DeleteMostly I recognise the blogger tools leave me a big blindspot but it is what I've got - and given I'm making few decisions based off this, it is good enough for my curiousity.