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If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

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Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#81

Post by londons_explore »

momokoko wrote: post #48
dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality

> search has certainly lowered in quality

I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.

A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#82

Post by Klipi »

I recently fell in love with https://micro.blog

It sounds exactly like what the OP is looking for. In addition to being a easy-to-use (micro)blogger-focused platform (no ads, $5/month basic plan for hosting), the fact that they allow you to host everything on your own domain and cross post to more widely used platforms like Twitter and Medium seems like the best of both worlds. My current flow is writing in iA Writer and saving to Dropbox (for long term archiving). iA Writer allows publishing directly to micro.blog. Following other people through RSS feels like a breath of fresh air after being used to the Twitter feed for too long. I thought that RSS was dead for a long time, but checking out NetNewsWire and the default feeds there restored a bit of faith for me.

I hope and believe that blogging is going to survive this current centralized social media boom, and come out stronger in the end.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#83

Post by smitty1e »

momokoko wrote: post #48
dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality

Hence Duck Duck Go.

As with TFA, the notion that Google has some death grip on data is premature at best.

Go to Wordpress and start a blog. The fascists have blown up much of the rest of social media.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#84

Post by zhdc1 »

Mizza wrote: post #58

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has cr…

Twitter is great for pushing current events or initiating discussion on less well thought out topics.

It's not a good place for conversation. And that's ok, as long as users understand these limitations and there's an alternative (blogs or forums) that interested participants can turn to.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#85

Post by [deleted] »

_bxg1 wrote: post #78
Mizza wrote: post #58

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has cr…

All you have to do is viciously mute/unfollow people and words that are remotely in the sphere of something someone might get angry about. My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.

[deleted]

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#86

Post by pmlnr »

okareaman wrote: post #62
pmlnr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I blog on Facebook That is not a blog. You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable. None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.

I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.

Short answers: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths and https://indieweb.org/Facebook

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#87

Post by jeffkeen »

naavis wrote: post #34
cm2187 wrote: post #18

I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).

I don't think RSS has gone anywhere. Most half-decent blogs still support it, I think.

Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS.

Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#88

Post by cm2187 »

naavis wrote: post #34
cm2187 wrote: post #18

I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).

I don't think RSS has gone anywhere. Most half-decent blogs still support it, I think.

Yes but most people broadcast their views or interesting findings on twitter because that’s where the audience is.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#89

Post by alisonatwork »

christiansakai wrote: post #36
ordinaryradical wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.

I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content. I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.

LiveJournal has worked this way for decades and still exists.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#90

Post by owenshen24 »

Self-promoting that I have a blog with scattered thoughts here: https://mlu.red/

Also built with a custom static site generator (https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta), like many other blogs in the comments here. Woot for customizability and self-expression.

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