Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them.

Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.

And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.

Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?

Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.)

I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)

> But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform

No they don't. I avoid Medium and Substack like the plague. I don't use those sites for discovery at all, and whenever I come across a link to a blog on either of them, I usually regret clicking it.

I end up on plenty of blogs found through various sources. A few I've been reading diligently or on-and-off for many years, others I read one-off articles here and there that I've found through sites like HN.

The blogosphere's death is highly exaggerated, regardless of what TFA says.

> Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get

I don't see that as a bad thing.

> And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end

I don't think it will. I think there will always be enough people writing interesting long-form articles to satisfy my curiosity. Mind you, I don't exclusively read blogs, but I haven't touched social media in 5 or 6 years and that hasn't caused me to run out of interesting things to read.

The "Blogosphere" represented something like Livejournal. You'd write your daily thoughts, not so much imagepost at all, and there would be your friends doing the same thing whom you'd check on. Some countries still have internet ecosystems like this; NAVER is the main one I can think of, in Korea; Livejournal itself was sold to a Russian buyer nearly 20 years ago and lives on in that country mostly intact and widely used.

But longform internet posts are gone nowadays in America, largely - due to English. It's too widely spoken for things to be found easily. Think about finding information about heavy metal concerts in Finland: that's probably doable from Google purely based on the fact you're not imputing English.

Last point: https://www.statista.com/statistics/990899/livejournal-users...

Self hosting a newsreader has been remarkably satisfying. Over the past few years I've been adding blogs to as I encounter them here and in a few other places, and it's one of my favorite places to spend a few hours browsing through things other folks spent the time to write. I kinda feel like everyone should have something like this, and I deeply regret Google Reader's retirement for that reason.