2024-10-24
The growing pains of the renewed small web
I just clicked into someone's blogroll and visited a large sample of the linked sites to discover half of them have not been updated in several months, some have less than 5 posts (in total), one was suspended. There may be a renewed interest in blogging and personal websites but sadly many never seem to actually get a proper start or, if they do, are not very long-lived.
I expect that personal, hosted publishing will always be far smaller than micro posts on social media and I wonder why that is? Certainly it takes more effort to get started but even some of those that make that initial effort then stall out.
My guess is many start a blog but are not sure of their intent which leads to a lack of motivation and effort. They get it setup, fiddle with the design and when it comes time to post are left with: "Oh, now what?".
And, along with this, they're likely coming from social media of some sort which continues to drain away attention and motivation. It's easier to passively consume a timeline of funny animal videos. A week of no posts turns into a month and then many months have passed with nothing. The blog is abandoned.
That's not a judgment, just an observation. There is a real effort involved in publishing a blog or a personal site that needs to be nourished by a desire to share or otherwise document one's life or interests. Anything beyond a quick micro post takes at least a little sustained effort and time to create. It's a kind of commitment. And for many of us we do it with no expectation of income or social interaction. It is creating for the sake of creating, sharing without expectation of response.
I'm not sure that there's a problem here. It is what it is. There are services like micro.blog that are attempting to bridge the gap by providing full blog hosting that also offers commenting and a community timeline. But I've been around there for a few years and it has its own set of problems, namely poor blog and user discovery that is actually getting worse. Many accounts set-up there seem to suffer the same problem of abandonment. It feels like very small though somewhat stable community.
Bear Blog is another that does a much better job at discovery but not much in the way of community. And OMG.LOL is another that offers blog hosting as well as a mastodon account. My intent with this post wasn't offer a survey of services that offer blog hosting so much as to mention the few that I know of that offer some sort of discovery or social feature that might help create social or community interactions for bloggers. The "IndyWeb" folks are also doing this sort of thing with webmentions.
There's also the 32bit Cafe which offers a supportive community and numerous resources for folks interested in building the personal web. Less blog oriented but worth mentioning are hosting services like Neocities that seems to have an active community of users though I've not spent much time there. I should remedy that.
Having these services is, no doubt, better than not having them. They do provide easier access to setting up a personal websites and blogs. Those are all positive developments. Whatever happens with this renewed personal web I love seeing it and appreciate it as a step forward. I hope we can slowly nourish and support people's interest in building and sharing our web.
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