If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)

Yes - and all the people the author remembers with nostalgia are probably on Twitter now, doing more or less the same thing but with worse quality overall. Twitter gets a bad rap because of the hive mind (and it deserves every bit of that reputation), but there are tons of just normal people on there talking about their lives. In a way, Twitter made blogging much more accessible - most people couldn't sit down and write a 500-1000 word post, even one or two a year, but they can tweet every detail about their day, their projects, what they're thinking about and so on.

Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time, dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck, you'd probably gain a significant following.

I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it works, and they're becoming more and more closed and restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually.

Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say.

Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who posted great content: women who were activists, historians, academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is, and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the normies, so to speak.

I kind of miss the days when people had servers and ".plan" and ".project" files that folks could read via finger servers.

We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell accounts on unix systems to do that today?

I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some of that back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

(Notice how HN content has huge number of links to blogs).

Best thing about blogs at the beginning was that they were not mainstream. They were specialized and interesting.

When they were mainstream in the internet only short period between internet becoming mainstream and social networks and platforms gaining popularity.

Today blogs are back in the golden age of not being mainstream. It's easier to find quality content by following them and their links to other blogs.

Do you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has gone way down, but the number of users as well.

probably worth mentioning this HN thread: "Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?" with 273 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195