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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

> There are enough places on the web built to hog your attention; keep you scrolling and checking your feed, hoping for a new like or retweet. WriteFreely gives you the space to think for yourself again, free from alerts, feeds, and the distractions of classic social media.

I think within a decade we all are going to come back to blog/personal sites and ditch social media. The easier we make people to set up self hosted blogs, faster will be the switch. I know general public does not give a shit about this but a man can hope.

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The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to discover. Case in point: there are a lot of personal sites out there right now (and many more which existed but are now offline), that only a few people even know exist.

We have platforms which make it easy to set up self-posted blogs, we just need a way to make them more discoverable. Which is what Twitter, Reddit, and especially Medium (which I imagine WriteFreely was inspired by) had in mind.

This is something I said before: the reason existing platforms dominate the market is because they have the most users. Most people create blogs or any other kind of content because they want to be heard.

> The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to discover.

I completely agree with you. Discovery still seems to be the hardest problem to solve.

I, as a blog owner, I decided that the best way to contribute solve this problem comes in two ways:

1) By linking more to external sites and talk about websites I like and push for more networking to take place rather than only linking internally to generate more traffic

2) I created https://theforest.link/ as a way to bring back some of the fun in the way we explore the web.

These two won’t obviously solve the problem altogether but I think if more people try their best to spread the word about content worth consuming we can solve the discovery issue without inventing a separate discovery platform.

Also, we should bring back blogrolls

Hey your site is really cool! How/where/in what fashion did you compile your random list of sites?

It’s just a curated list of all sorts of random links, stored on airtable.

The site is as low tech as it gets. I was just trying to make something fun and help people discover interesting sites.

It’s mostly personal sites/blogs and some indie publication.

Is the entire list shared anywhere?

But here you have at least the AtivityPub integration. This allows users at instances of the Fediverse to subscribe and share your contents in a quite native way.

The Micropub / Microsub standard follows a similar, even more granular approach (where content types note and article are existent explicitly).

Of course, those alternative network standards are not attracting the broad majority of users yet but this is not a technical problem.

ActivityPub just pushes the discovery problem to the homeserver administrator, who must find -- via word of mouth -- other Fedi relays to federated with, or the homeserver is a silo.

No part of this discovery step is automated or aided by the software.

Personally I think it's a big oversight in the ActivityPub protocol.. but then again, ActivityPub is more oversights than it is features.

I don't think that is the main benefit. I think it is the ability to "reshare" a post and have your followers see it. So you can follow your "friends" and learn about new blogs from there. There is no reason that this couldn't be done on regular blogs, but it isn't common.

AP has Note and Article object types.

The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to discover.

I think the problem with the web as it is now is that it's too easy to discover sites. Which is why more and more (though not enough) people distrust the large search providers.

Nothing the tech companies have invented carries the weight of word-of-mouth and personal recommendations. You've probably seen it in your own browsing.

Search for something → Open 30 tabs from the search results and look at each one for a fraction of a second.

See a link described on HN → Open one tab and give it a fair shot.

It would be nice to see the return of niche search engines. Want to know something about architecture? Visit architecturesearch.example and when you search for "skyscraper" you get information about tall buildings, and not bad action films and ads for high-heeled shoes.

> I think the problem with the web as it is now is that it's too easy to discover sites. Both are the same problem: it’s hard to find good sites among the massive amount of clickbait, SEO optimization, and generally low-quality sites. It’s a hard problem too. There are a million users who all want blogs, and a million bloggers who all want viewers. The reality is, if you or I were to start a blog it would probably only be interesting to a few people. So your goal is to get said blog to the right few people, while getting a different blog to a different right few people, etc. a million times.

A niche search engine is a good solution, for niche content you already know about. For discovering new niche content you’d need a really good algorithm (perhaps based on similar niches) or some other system.

> ditch social media

Personally I have made my addiction to social media work for me. I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I can't afford $5.00 per month, and happily let ADs subsidize these companies (Twitter, Facebook etc).

>I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them.

I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories of complex user data and very little regulation in place to restrict their use.

Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal data for convenience.

Who is we?

Me and quaintdev!

And me!

And me.

...and my axe!

Sorry.

Ok, but what about those stuck behind in the walled gardens and currated feeds?

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