Remember the days of Geocities? People created blinky, colorful web pages in the early days of the WWW:
Later, blogs became a thing - there was lots of software, better or worse and everything was held together with RSS or Atom, a simple technology known as syndication.
Then came the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok and many, many more. It got easier to create and consume content, but forgotten was the technology that held together those blogs. Platforms acted to keep users on their systems, created walled gardens. Instead of the users, the platforms’ algorithms started to choose the content that we all would get to see. Over time, this had a huge impact: it made possible fake news, filter bubbles and echo chambers. Also content creators or small businesses became dependent on these algorithms, because they drove users to their pages more than anything else.
If you are creating content on the web, I suggest you create a blog - it will keep you free and independent in the long run and you are less dependent on any company’s algorithm. It will also help to make the web a better place, I truly believe. And I am not the only one.
Writing a blog
There are endless options on how to do that; I am using hugo as a static site generator, but when you’re not a developer like me, there are free, managed options to write a blog:
- ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear
- write.as
- blogger.com by Google
- wordpress.com (hosted Wordpress by the company behind WP)
- and lots more… Search for it!
Be advised that blogging platforms run by individuals likely give you corporate independence, but more likely do shut down one day. The ones run by companies are more likely to stay, but maybe they’ll change their terms of service later. Use one that does support exporting all your content into a download - this way, you have the option to go somewhere else.
When you wish to have your own domain name, this will usually cost some money.
Reading blogs
While you can just type in the website address when you want to read a certain blog, it is not feasible for a growing number of blogs. Use a blog reader, an aggregation website (or application) that regularely checks the websites you’re interested in for new posts and displays them for you - this uses RSS or Atom under the hood, so the site must support it, and most do. Google reader once was a very popular website which was shut down 10 years ago, unfortunately.
There are some others, or you can run a program on your computer to do this.
- feedreader.com
- feedly.com
- and much more; again search for them.
Once you’ve built a list of blogs that you follow, there’ll usually be a great number of unread posts there. Be kind to yourself and accept that - just mark them all read at some point. You cannot read the entire internet and there’s no need to feel guilty about it.
There it is: the ingredients to make your own content platform and to make the web better. Go ahead! :-)
