TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people’s websites.
For years, people have posted their anecdotal or technical useful information on reddit because it was the most popular centralised but community-based website. So much that, this created the “<search query> + reddit” phenomenon.
We shouldn’t have put all of our eggs in one basket: with the slow and painful downfall of the centralised network, we suddenly realised that most of our cumulative knowledge has been hosted on someone else’s website of which owners don’t give a damn about its users.
reddit is a link aggregator, it was meant to be used to discover other websites but in time, it turned into the website. This was a massive problem. Now that we’ve got the threadiverse, it makes me worry that we’ll repeat the same mistake all over again.
Normally, I would’ve posted this on my blog and link it here but for years we’ve gotten accustomed to not “self-promote”. This behaviour caused all traffic and engagement to stay in one place. There was nothing wrong with self-publishing; we left, spammers stayed.
Yes, there will always be that person with a bloated Wordpress blog with articles that sound like it was written by AI but, honestly, it’s easy to block a domain, we’ve got the tools. We can fight off the spam and find gems on the internet.
The threadiverse is a beautiful thing, but accessing information shouldn’t depend on it. Thanks for reading my blog post.
great take. I wanna go back to the days of stumbleupon, and getting redirected to all sorts of separate and interesting sites. reddit made the internet feel smaller imo
I definitely agree with this. I’ve often thought recently about how different the internet feels compared to even just a few years ago. “reddit made the internet feel smaller” is spot on for describing that feeling.
I really miss Stumbleupon. I found a bunch of really interesting niche websites that way.
Wouldn’t this just encourage SEO clickbaits more though? Also, a lot of these blogs can die over time, so it’s also not the most reliable (like the owner can die or the domain providing service has expired or some shit). Also, how can this solve the problem of confabulated misconceptions (let’s say that there are blogs that are feeding misinformation)? Without a moderating system, a comment section that can exist to engage and debunks those statements, and the upvote/downvote system… I think that it’s hard to tell reliability of the information. Feel free to debunk my doubts though.
I agree with you. I think it wasn’t clear in my original post, so let me clarify. The threadiverse is awesome, comment sections are important for us to parse, debunk, or amplify information. What I’d like to see more of is that links to informative blogs that people control, instead of posts that are hosted only on link aggregators. SEO and longevity of blogs is a whole another 'net culture issue; people must keep linkrot in mind while producing content and take precautions for their longevity (there are lots of tools for that but I won’t get into detail).
I don’t think the upvote/downvote system has merit in accuracy of information. It’s just what is popular with the hive-mind. My time with Reddit has shown me people barely click through links, let alone able to discern what is factually correct. I’ve seen Redditors upvote things that are in my domain of expertise that were just flat out wrong. Also, Reddit is federated by moderators of individual subs, so it’s not that different than what we have here.
But site reliability is certainly something Reddit has over the Fediverse. It may not be as resilient, but just like all major platforms, having a single master of information like Reddit invites enshitification.
Blogs and rss. Or make it easier to “federate” on the user level where each individual is an instance. But then, I like the idea of mesh nets, too.
i’ve heard that WordPress might be good for publishing your blog to fediverse with using ActivityPub plugin
You could do that or just write a blog post and then share it on KBin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.
There’s also Write Freely, which is a minimalist federated blogging platform.
I would generally agree with you. Bring blogging back, baby! But the question of discovery is still open. I’m optimistic about the threadiverse over the long haul in this regard, but there’s a lot of work we’ll need to do to get there. Also blogging feels daunting to the less technically-inclined still. I’m not sure the traditional blog platforms out there (Wordpress.com, etc.) are quite up to the task…they typically end up catering to more of the power-user business site use cases.
We could also bring back the old Webring concept for discoverability. Might even be able to decentralize and federate that bit.
