Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway

Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.

Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?

I have been blogging for decades, personal and work. I look at traffic patterns and see all the comments coming through.

I don't think personal blogs are back.

Niche forums. Federated.

Don't call it a comeback. We've been here for years.

Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.

I was wondering what the definition of "niche" was going to be:

   Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. 

I think that's a good one to highlight as NOT niche, and niche is much more specific. Like I've had a librarian blog since 1999. Pretty much niche.

Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.

The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.

how's it going?

Does that actually exist? I know there are reddit type clones, but I'm yet to see anything that allows me to setup a niche server and only that.

While there are ~ millions of blog engines out there, what is the current state of commenting and trackbacks?

I want to start one myself. More of a public journal, but all the same. I keep having fits and starts and things distract me from the habit. That, and I'm never satisfied with my implementation in the end and I always want to try new or different things.

If you want to setup a super minimal blog checkout Neat CSS.

https://neat.joeldare.com

I standardized on pure HTML and CSS and wrote about why:

https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...

Yeah, there quite a few. Like old-school phpBB is still around[1]. Or, take a look at the list on Wikipedia[2].

Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server.

[1] https://www.phpbb.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_s...

We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.

I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.

One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.

Isn't there a cycle - blogs, aggregators, email lists, back to blogs...?

The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.

How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K.

Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.

I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get read

Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/

Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.

Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.

Discourse also has a (first-party) ActivityPub plugin now!

We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.

> It never was and never will be mainstream.

We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.

I didn’t know they ever went out

I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well

My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.

It was a great time. Social media’s reached beyond that though. Grandma wasn’t online back then.

SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.

That grandma is dead. The online grandma is her daughter.

*You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.

It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.

The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.

> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.

Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!

Fixed it for you.

Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.

Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.

I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around

There's some here https://indieweb.org/webring

We had similar childhoods - though I did phpBB. Never had an audience for the forum, but it was cool just having and styling it. Good times.

Haha thanks ;)

If you’re looking to put one up, try https://bearblog.dev (no connection, just appreciate Herman’s work).

It’s got just the features you need, is built by a solo dev, and it’s got a very fair split between free and paid features. I used it to put up my personal site and have been very happy with the experience.