Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

Okay, I'll shill my feed reader since it's an example of one that lets you organize feeds and doesn't present a firehose: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

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.

> Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.

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.

I don't really know what you mean. There's a ton of feed readers, both from an application and server side. I don't really need a lot of organization, but I've never seen a reader without support for folders. If you need more than one layer of hierarchy at 50 blogs... I have no idea what you're doing. I follow like 250 blogs and have just two folders, maybe, and it's super maintainable.

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.

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Not sure I fully understand what you mean by distribution here. What I meant is that the ratio of personal blogs supporting RSS to the total number of blogs is too low, indicating a lack of adoption.

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.

> Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it

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.

Yes, and back then the way to go was to have a personal website with links to all your friends and some other cool sites around the web. If you wanted more discoverability, you'd join a webring (or try your shot at getting listed in a directory).

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 think it is a change in proportion instead of a change in perspective. The people who write for the love of the process were doing it before it became mainstream and many kept doing it after too, or found a different venue, maybe even just writing on paper or a typewriter, as it wasn't about the income for them anyway.

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.

I tried the whole "ads and reach" thing for a while, discovered I actually don't care about it for "beer money" levels of revenue, and went back to just blogging about that which I care about, for the intrinsic benefits of having to write my projects up.

- 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.

I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.