What is a Hitching Post?

[osteophage]

[Note: this post was originally made to Pillowfort on Dec 13, 2018.]

This is just a quick reference post to explain what a "hitching post" means on pillowfort, why we have them, and how they got started.

Short Answer: A hitching post is a roundup of links that you post to your blog, just to share with your followers a few places where you've left comments at lately.

So why do we have these? How did they become a thing?

Back in September, pillowfort user Erran pointed out one of the consequences of the pillowfort reblog system & feed, in contrast with the tumblr dash. Here's a part of that post that gives you the gist:

I far prefer to comment on something I see rather than reblog it, but that does mean I'm not sharing the discussion with my followers.

That post sparked a very large discussion, which you can read in the comments, but I'm going to direct your attention to just one of them here, where I wrote:

I almost made a post on this just a few minutes ago! It was gonna be a fortkeeping post about maybe starting to do a style of post where I link to whatever discussions I've commented in lately, for whatever posts where I like something going on in the comment section but don't necessarily feel like reblogging the main post. If that caught on, do you think that could help?

People expressed an interest in that, but we weren't sure yet what to call it. So, I subsequently made this post where I took naming suggestions for what to call these link roundup things.

TJ suggested "hitching posts," which I immediately loved because it's a pun: some of the early suggestions were toying with the idea of "travel," and a hitching post is a post used for temporarily tying a horse, so you can make sure it stays put if you walk away for a bit (here is a picture of one with horses). But since "hitch" also means "connect" and "post" can mean, well, "blogpost," that means "hitching post" can mean connection blogpost. And there you have it!

If you decide to make a hitching post, you can use whatever tag you want for it, but if you would like to see examples of existing hitching posts that other people have made, you can run a tag search for hitching post or pfio hitching post.

Comments

[pangolin20]

As a note, the link to the hitching post image is broken. Here is an archived version.

For something about the content of the post, do you have any idea if people are doing this on Dreamwidth? On some thought, there's Community Thursdays, but that isn't quite the same thing, and I don't think I've encountered it myself.

[osteophage]

Oh, thanks for the alternate link.

I don't know of anyone on Dreamwidth making links-to-comments posts in this specific way, but certainly miscellaneous link roundups seem ordinary enough. I know vriddy has done those sometimes. If you'd like to start doing more PF-style hitching posts here, I say go for it.

[pangolin20]

You're welcome! And thanks for the vote of confidence, too; I don't know if I'll end up doing it, but I'm more comfortable with it now.