The Blog is Already Back

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

Let’s bring back the blog. And leave all the bad things spawned by the blogosphere to social media, where they belong.

--"Bring Back the Blog", Alan Jacobs

See, the thing is, I think the blog is already back. Just because social media giants (and the small guys too) are taking up most of the discourse w/r/t web interaction doesn't mean the blog is not back. Thankfully, most of the interesting stuff I find now isn't through social media anymore. It's still through RSS, and still through indie blogs run by regular ol' people like you and me.

I think the only thing I'd really like to see is an easier way / lower barrier for entry into indie blogging. I can figure out how to put together a little static site generator of my own, and blog through my terminal and text files. I doubt most regular folks can do that. And my sense is that Wordpress and other tools like it are too heavy for most folks' use.

I did find this little tool the other day (via my RSS feed, via an indie blog!) which is pretty cool and simple. Looks as easy as having a couple folders on your computer, linking to something like Dropbox, and syncing up the folders once you've written a post or shared an image.

Anyway, to the original point of this post -- blogging might have done a little hibernating while we all experimented with a few sites that functioned as somewhat-global town squares. But my sense is that it is reawakening and ready to give us a warm, cozy hug when we are ready for it again.

Tagged: blogging, technology, open web,