The rise and fall of blogs

Blogger services like LiveJournal or Blogger were very trending in the early 2000s as they were fresh and unique for quite a long time but quickly lost their popularity with the rise of social networks and microblogging services in 2010s. There were many reasons for that starting from poor management decisions and up to inability to keep up with the latest trends. E.g. you can read about Livejournal death timeline in this DailyDot article. That led to authors leaving to other services and these platforms stagnation, lack of support, poor or no mobile applications and general state of boredom and abandonment.

Social platforms

Early 2010s brought us microblogging boom with mostly Twitter: and later Instagram:

As by 2019 there’re many other social platforms like Facebook, Telegram (channels), Vkontakte (#1 site in Russia¹) that you can use for “blogging”. And while some people successfully pull them off (see Raymond Hettinger twitter or Ekaterina Schulmann facebook) for the most part such platforms do not provide the necessary tools for complete blogging experience.

The main downside being too much noise in the newsfeed from all your subscriptions. Usually when using some social platform now you are silently obliged to follow many of your friends, coworkers and relatives. Combine that with some celebrities and top that with a number of authors that you are not acquainted with but would like to read. And these authors may fall into different categories like travel/work/politics/economics/etc.

And then expand this for all other social platforms. That’s a real hell to find some valuable information in such newsfeed and it’s very easy to miss the posts you may want to read. You may use email or mobile notifications about important posts but this way you are not solving the problem but moving it to another place: now you need to filter your emails and get through mobile notifications from a bunch of different services.

Back to personal blogs

WordPress powers more that 33% of all the websites according to w3techs. Of course that includes not only blogs but also websites and apps, but being so popular it provides the ability to anyone easily create a personal blog on the most popular platform. We are stepping back to the time when livejournal was popular. But this time it’s different.

More and more people less rely on third-party platforms and services and start building and hosting their websites by themselves. We all saw how easily Google shuts down its services, how users data is leaked, image hostings are closed… At the same time virtual hosting is becoming cheaper, you may have a full working server for less than $5/month: There’re a lot of tutorials, forums and people eager to help you build your own infrastructure. Not to forget vast collection of free resources like bootstrap and jekyll templates.

All this gives you the power and control over your data: what and how you store and share. And what’s also important it makes it easier for your readers to track your posts via RSS. No more cluttered newsfeed in facebook, but simple and elegant RSS counters only for those blogs you actually read. Leave facebook and vkontakte to what they were designed to be best: your contact book and photo albums.

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