I recently reorganised this website and brought in content from sites that I set up ages ago – 2008 for the first ones. It made me realise how important blogging was to me in those days, when I was part of the EU blogging platform and met so many great people that way, some of whom are still good friends today.
Then micro-blogging came along and there was a quicker way to interact with people and say what you felt the world, or your tiny corner of it, needed to hear. But since the Musk takeover, I’ve completely fallen out of love with Twitter/X/whatever it is, and haven’t really found anything that has felt like a decent replacement. Facebook and Instagram are too full of ads, and LinkedIn, although my preferred social media platform these days, doesn’t feel like a place to bring the full 100% Antonia, yarn, mutts and all.
So I’m thinking that, like vinyl, blogging might be back. Just like email has proved tenacious, maybe the idea of your own platform, where you make the rules, is making sense all over again.
PS. I asked Notion AI for a first version of this post. It totally got what I wanted to say, but I didn’t use a word. Still some training to be done before it sounds anything other than bland. Or is it my prompting?
Love the analogy of blogging as vinyl! And totally agree that Twitter sucked all the oxygen out of blogging. Another thing that didn’t help was the decline of RSS (particularly when the plug was pulled on Google Reader).
Still, now Twitter is slowly morphing into whatever toxic hellspace Elon Musk is conjuring, hopefully that creates (as you say) an opportunity for blogging to make a comeback.
I would love to see a blogging community return, but it should probably be a more resilient community than last time. It shouldn’t just be that the next shiny thing (Threads?) comes along and kills blogging again. That’s why framing it like vinyl is such a good way to think about it: vinyl has a timeless quality that will survive whatever new technology comes along to disrupt the music industry. People have made a choice to stick with vinyl, and they see it as giving them something valuable. I hope blogging can achieve that kind of timelessness.