feeds.social

Where have all the bloggers gone?

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:10:27 -0400

Some say blogging is taking off again. I ask if it ever left?

I think a certain type of blog post become more prominent over the years. Bloggers concentrted on deep dives on serious themes like the “How to deploy Postgresql and Ruby on Rail on Digital Ocean”.

So I consider the recent changes more like moving back to the early days when bloggers posted about anything. It was a web “log” about peoples lives and interests. Of course something like Scripting News had a tech side to it because Dave Winer has a tech side to him. But blogs back then filled what the social sites eventually took a large chunk of.

And on a side note, Dave Winer is right that the easy Follow button was a major winner for Twitter, but you can’t take for granted that it also brought in a bunch of users because of ease of signup and use. Most people have zero desire to run their own blog, and while there were hosted blogging platforms back then (some very popular) I think FB and Twitter made the whole process easier, if only slightly.

I think we are in a great place. At least, the best place the web has been in since before 2006.

One area that is a focus for me in 2025 is Open Local Social. That’s an area in great need and hard to do with standard blogging platforms. I’m off Facebook and Instagram but I miss a few of the local groups I belonged to on Facebook and the local posts I saw on Instagram, like my favorite local restaurants and musicians.

And I’m working on those things both on the Fediverse and Bluesky and within RSS! On Bluesky I recently created Geo to create and get local posts, an idea I had built on Twitter around 2007. It’s got a ways to and the community is on it. And I plan to have something similar on ActivityPub by the Fediforum conference in early April. That’s alongside working with the ActivityPub GeoSocial Task Force. And yes, both will have RSS feeds (out at least).

Great times ahead. And I have a lot more to say regarding Open Local Social in some coming posts.

Welcome to feeds.social

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 10:20:50 -0400

feeds.social is a journal and catalogue of work about … you guessed it … social news feeds, with a particular emphasis on open protocols and algorithms.

Dave Winer asks why I believe in “The writer’s web”. Well, if you believe in the web at all, and of course I do, I’d say you believe in the writer’s web. But I get his point that the silos of the last two decades have severely handicapped some basic and universal web functionality.

What purpose does limiting the format of the content have when simple ways to accomodate all the web offers are available? It’s hard to come up with a legitimate answer to that question.

But if I were to pick one item where this attack is most egregious, it would be (for me) the hyperlink..

Whether it’s Apple trying to get rid of URLs in their browser and apps, or Facebook and Instagram making content inaccessible, or Google masking search results, it’s all simply an attack on democracy. It’s an attack on freedom. Without the link, there is no digital freedom.

The link is the web., literally. Once the link goes away, we’ve regressed back to cable tv and newspapers.

Now, while I support some of the newer social networks, including Mastodon, the Fediverse and Bluesky, I do share some of the concerns. One can certainly understand being skeptical about Bluesky. Where there is venture capital, there is danger, and they should clearly state how they might avoid that danger in the years to come. But capital can bring some benefits as well, despite the usual “enshittification” that follows.

And a more decentralized network like the Fediverse isn’t safe just because there is less money and more distribution. Powerful people and coalitions can control our discourse in other ways, some subtle and some not so.

Some might call that the culture of the network, and yes it is. And culture can be good or bad.

Technology is neither good nor bad, but a tool that can be used for such.

And the most powerful tool in digital technology history is the link.