Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.

It's only for Firefox though because I like my reader being integrated into my browser and Firefox was the only one that supported a sidebar at the time. Looks like Chrome supports sidebars to now. So mayhaps I'll update it.

What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.

Anyway, services like Feedbin have been going strong for a long time, have a rock solid syncing system with great tools for things like seeing frequency of posting and abandoned or moved feeds, folders, automatic filters, and broad support in the app ecosystem if you don't like their apps or web experience (which is very good).

RSS is absolutely extensive and has millions of users. It's at least as mainstream as Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's just not talked about as such, and that's _excluding_ Podcasts as a use case.

I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.

I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm.

But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat.

To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of.

It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it.

DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.

In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find.

That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.

- It forces me to finish things. I was, prior to having a blog, fairly prone to "90% done, I'll finish it later..." sort of stuff, which led to a lot of mental clutter from "having to keep track of what was still inflight."

- I can, after a project is done, confidently flush all details of it from my brain, because anything I found odd or notable that would be worth remembering is noted in my blog posts.

And often enough, I'll end up down a weird research rabbit hole I wouldn't have otherwise gone down, learning about new subjects, so I can write something up with what I feel is enough understanding to competently write about it.