Its a bittersweet feeling. Blogging was an information dissemination revolution that was made possible by the web. Giving individuals unprecedented ability to s

Its a bittersweet feeling. Blogging was an information dissemination revolution that was made possible by the web. Giving individuals unprecedented ability to self-publish on any niche subject and reaching remote audiences anywhere in the world (the famous long-tail). The revolution was suppressed. While easy enough to setup by writers (especially if not self-hosted) and accessed by readers, the combination of bookmarks, rss, blog comments and web based search and discovery was ultimately overtaken by the "super-easy" setups offered by the social media walled gardens (social graphs, follows, viral "likes", algorithmic timelines and a race to the short-form bottom). But not all is lost. The extreme commercialization, privacy concerns and algorithmic oppression of social media has all but ruined it as a platform. People have been thinking and working on somehow reinstating the original promise of the web as a decentralized platform for self-publishing. While not quite yet mainstream, projects such as the Wordpress activitypub plugin [1] suggest we could dream of a new blogosphere blooming. Here's to the next 20 years! [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/