The determination to move away from the addictive doom-scrolling of social media has given me pause, given me space to look around at how I use the internet and figure out where I get most value and where I WANT to get it from.
TLDR; unsurprisingly, it’s connection to people.
When social media first appeared it really was about the people using it; admittedly for us early adopters who were already well established online within our own little niché of semi-similarity minded people — think blogrolls and webrings — the rise of Twitter was exciting and immediate and, hey look, all my favourite online friends are all there too.
It was a closing of the gap that blogs and blog comments couldn’t quite bridge. Blog posts would get posted everyday, but even with comments, their life span was only as long as the next post. Whilst the immediacy of posting and commenting was addictive (and I believe it’s really where social media was born) it wasn’t conversational enough, there was no joint timeline that everyone could view. Twitter got that bit right.
Of course now that Twitter, sorry, X is a cesspool of right-wing bile I’m even happier that I left it a few years back — I still check my old handle @gordon which still has had 0 posts since I sold it — and, despite moving to Threads, Bluesky and (not really) Mastodon, my main social media remains Instagram, which is possibly the doom-scrolliest of them all. Yes, it’s a word. Probably.
Back to blogs
Given that my recent moves away from social media has pushed me back into the wonderful world of blogging, both spending more time rebuilding my own site and finding more blogs to read, I am heartened that not only is blogging undergoing a ‘moment’ but that there is serious thought being given as to WHY we are heading back to blogs. As a very early blogging adopter, the interactions and conversations we had in the earliest days, which included a lot of discovery of new blogs as they came online, was a joy to be a part of, it felt like a real community.
Through blogging I’ve been lucky to meet many wonderful people, attend two weddings, numerous meet-ups, parties, and the like, and some of those connections have survived through various iterations of social media and methods of consumption to the present day. Whilst I won’t be arranging any Scottish Bloggers meet-ups any time soon, it’s encouraging to even imagine that such a thing could actually happen again in the future.
Looking back at early iterations of my website there is a common theme, the blogroll with dozens of websites listed, all of which I interacted with on a weekly basis, and many of whom I would call … acquaintances as worst, friends at best. Look at the left most sidebar, wild times!
As I’ve mentioned before I think interaction between bloggers is a good thing even if some of the newer platforms don’t have commenting built in, which in turn pushes us to email or, ironically, onto social media to interact, but as ever finding good new blogs that meet whatever criteria you hold dearest is the challenge.
I’ve been on a bit of a mission to try and find reliable sources for all these new, wonderful, indie-web blogs that have been slowly blossoming over the past couple of years, and it seems like I’m not the only one. I pinky promise I started drafting this post late last week before Kevin posted his!
Sidenote: This happens to me a lot which suggests I’m always one step behind where the crowd is starting to head, never a leader, but a very very close follower, of a trend?
Blog Discovery
Here are my current, frequently used, sources — you can head to Kevin’s post to get his and I won’t double up the ones we both use already!
- Scour– which allows you to upload your current OPML, as well as browse other interests and popular feeds
- Ooh.directory – as the name suggests, a directory of blogs, with a nice ‘recently updated’ section on the front page (my blog is here)
- Indieblog – one post at a time if you prefer a more random way to discover blogs.
OK, so I will mention Bubbles too, largely because it seems to be (rightly) gaining in popularity, and so in a few months I can look back at this post and point out how cool I was for being there early (but not first, etc etc).
Bubbles feels a little like a mini-Digg kinda thing, with upvotes for posts and, whilst time will tell if it becomes the resource I hope it can, it’s definitely brought me some new blogs – including Kevin Quirks who’s post about how he discovers new blogs I’ve already linked too. See how this all works!
What are your thoughts?