In Defense of Open and Independent Blogging: Molly.micro.blog/2020/12/07/…

Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but I miss the days when blogs were the dominant social media.

Heh. I'm with you. But blogs to me are not social media. They are in my mind a communications medium which contains social interaction but is not dependent upon it but rather the content being communicated. I miss simple. I also once could identify signal and noise as separated.

There could be nothing more simple than this web site. Yet I can discern a sensible structure in it that can be mapped to a sylph of a blog framework that can be served by any stack. It can look like your blog with few lines of CSS. Simple enough? motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Web Design? Overrated! This example? HOT! I along with many folks had a daily "diary" in 1998 or so when @peterme tested my ken of country codes in URLs during a conference game (100% FTW!) I'm BBS born. Communities matter to me. Lone blogs feel too insular. Remember The Well?

Blogs as Peter coined 'em soon thereafter seem to me to balance forum style community with ample personal space and tools (archives, etc.). Social media? Different animal. Wordpress, etc? CMSs now, and while potent also not the right tool for lighter weight content/idea sharing.

Tumble logs seemed to blend ease of content creation and ease of discovery of their resources. But they lack the quality-of-engagement of seekers/subscribers that blogs value for marketing purposes. And except for execrable commenting features, both lack forum style community.

I have come to appreciate the model of the PHP resource community in which a vetted source of truth is maintained but user contributions are cultivated, vetted, and promoted. Maybe SourceForge appears the same, but administration seems heavier-handed and entitled there.