I've been cleaning up some of my subscriptions and RSS feeds lately (possibly for a digital decluttering like I did back in April 2019", but more importantly because I have over 200 feeds in my RSS reader (rss2email) and it's become difficult to see what all is in there. One trend that I've found disheartening are the number of blogs that have gone dormant over the years. Many of them were good blogs with excellent content, but over time the authors either said what they wanted to say or found other means for expressing themselves. I don't blame the authors (whatever works) but I wish authors would reconsider restarting their blogs. Part of this is that long-form communication has become the exception rather than the norm. There are plenty of folks who say short and sweet sentences on social media that could be larger thoughts if given the space. The other reason is that short-form social media gets perverted into longer-form blog posts. I'm guilty of starting a thought on Mastodon which then gets turned into a longer-form bit of content because there was more to say than what I said in the 500 or so characters I was given.

I imagine this trend is because making long-form content on mobile devices is tricky, and possibly painful to do. Sites like Twitter and Mastodon have a "fire and forget" approach to content where thoughts can be jotted down quickly and shared with others. I also imagine that Facebook is ubiquitous for most folks so creating thoughts there gets some reward.

I know this post is probably closer to "old man yells at cloud" levels of crabbiness. Perhaps this is akin to waiting for the internet newspaper to arrive on my doorstep. But I feel that blogs and owning your own content are still relevant in this era and I hope that folks rediscover some of the joys of using them.