One of the problems that keeps poking back at me every time I look for an alternative software for this blog, is that it somehow became not your average blog, particularly not in 2017.
The first issue is that there is a lot of history. While the current “incarnation” of the blog, with the Hugo install, is fairly recent, I have been porting over a long history of my pseudo-writing, merging back into this one big collection the blog posts coming from my original Gentoo Developer blog, as well as the few posts I wrote on the KDE Developers blog and a very minimal amount of content from my (mostly Italian) blog when I was in high school.
Why did I do it that way? Well the main thing is that I don’t want to lose the memories. As some of you might know already, I faced my mortality before, and I came to realize that this blog is probably the only thing of substance that I had a hand on, that will outlive me. And so I don’t want to just let migration, service turndowns, and other similar changes take away what I did. This is also why I did publish to this blog the articles I wrote for other websites, namely NewsForge and Linux.com (back when they were part of Geeknet).
Some of the recovery work actually required effort. As I said above there’s a minimal amount of content that comes from my high school days blog. And it’s in Italian that does not make it particularly interesting or useful. I had deleted that blog altogether years and years ago, so I had to use the Wayback Machine to recover at least some of the posts. I will be going through all my old backups in the hope of finding that one last backup that I remember making before tearing the thing down.
Why did I tear it down in the first place? It’s clearly a teenager’s blog and I am seriously embarrassed by the way I thought and wrote. It was 13 or 14 years ago, and I have admitted last year that I can tell so many times I’ve been wrong. But this is not the change I want to talk about.
The change I want to talk about is the second issue with finding a good software to run my blog: blogging is not what it used to be ten years ago. Or fifteen years ago. It’s not just that a lot of money got involved in the mean time, so now there are a significant amount of “corporate blogs”, that end up being either product announcements in a different form, or the another outlet for not-quite-magazine content. I know of at least a couple of Italian newspapers that provide “blogs” for their writers, which look almost exactly like the paper’s website, but do not have to be reviewed by the editorial board.
In addition to this, a lot of people’s blogs stopped providing as much details of their personal life as they used to. Likely, this is related to the fact that we now know just how nasty people on the Internet can be (read: just as nasty as people off the Internet), and a lot of the people who used to write lightheartedly don’t feel as safe, correctly. But there is probably another reason: “Social Media”.
The advent of Twitter and Facebook made it so that there is less need to post short personal entries, too. And Facebook in particular appears to have swallowed most of the “cutesy memes” such as quizzes and lists of things people have or have not done. I know there are still a few people who insist on not using these big names social networks, and still post for their friends and family on blogs, but I have a feeling they are quite the minority. And I can tell you for sure that since I signed up for Facebook, a lot of my smaller “so here’s that” posts went away.
This is a bit of a rough plot of blog sizes. In particular I have used the raw file size of the markdown sources used by Hugo, in bytes, which make it not perfect for Unicode symbols, and it includes the “front matter”, which means that particularly all the non-Hugo-native posts have their title effectively doubled by the slug. But it shows trends particularly well.
You can see from that graph that some time around 2009 I almost entirely stopped writing short blog posts. That is around the time Facebook took off in Italy, and a lot of my interaction with friends started happening there. If you’re curious of that visible lack of posts just around half of 2007, that was the pancreatitis that had me disappear for nearly two months.
With this reduction in scope of what people actually write on blogs, I also have a feeling that lots of people were left without anything to say. A number of blogs I still follow (via NewsBlur since Google Reader was shut down), post once or twice a year. Planets are still a thing, and I still subscribe to a number of them, but I realize I don’t even recognize half the names nowadays. Lots of the “old guard” stopped blogging almost entirely, possibly because of a lack of engagement, or simply because, like me, many found a full time job (or a full time family), that takes most of their time.
You can definitely see from the plot that even my own blogging has significantly slowed down over the past few years. Part of it was the tooling giving up on me a few times, but it also involves the lack of energy to write all the time as I used to. Plus there is another problem: I now feel I need to be more accurate in what I’m saying and in the words I’m using. This is in part because I grew up, and know how much words can hurt people even when meant the right way, but also because it turns out when you put yourself in certain positions it’s too easy to attack you (been there, done that).
A number of people that think argue that it was the demise of Google Reader¹ that caused blogs to die, but as I said above, I think it’s just the evolution of the concept veering towards other systems, that turned out to be more easily reachable by users.
So are blogs dead? I don’t think so. But they are getting harder to discover, because people use other platforms and it gets difficult to follow all of them. Hacker News and Reddit are becoming many geeks’ default way to discover content, and that has the unfortunate side effect of not having as much of the conversation to happen in shared media. I am indeed bothered about those people who prefer discussing the merit of my posts on those external websites than actually engaging on the comments, if nothing else because I do not track those platforms, and so the feeling I got is of talking behind one’s back — I would prefer if people actually told me if they shared my post on those platforms; for Reddit I can at least IFTTT to self-stalk the blog, but that’s a different problem.
Will we still have blogs in 10 years? Probably yes, but they will not look like the ones we’re used to most likely. The same way as nowadays there still are personal homepages, but they clearly don’t look like Geocities, and there are social media pages that do not look like MySpace.
¹ Usual disclaimer: I do work for Google at the time of writing this, but these are all personal opinions that have no involvement from the company. For reference, I signed the contract before the Google Reader shutdown announcement, but started after it. I was also sad, but I found NewsBlur a better replacement anyway.