The Web Should Be A Conversation

For a very long time, I've defended that the Web should be a conversation, a two-way street instead of a chute just pushing content into us.

The Web is the only mass media we currently have where most people can have a voice. I'm not saying all these voices have the same loudness nor that every single person in our beautiful planet and space stations can actually post to the Web, just that it is the one place where everyone has the potential to be a part of it. Contrast it with streaming services, radio, or even the traditional publishing industry and you'll see that a person alone with an idea has a lot more obstacles in their way, than when considering just starting a blog.

What if Skynet was stupid?

For the last couple of years, there has been a colossal push by Silicon Valley companies towards generative AI. Not only bots are going crazy gobbling all the content they can see regardless if they have the rights to do so or not, but content farms have been pushing drivel generated by such machines into the wider Web.

I have seen a horrible decline in the quality of my search results and the social platforms that I'm a part of — the ones with algorithmic timelines such as Instagram and YouTube — have been pushing terrible content towards me, the kind that tries to get a rise out of you. They do this to "toxically foster" engagement. Trying to get you to be so mad that you dive deeper into either an echo champer or a flame war.

Turning back to a human-centric Web

The enshitfication of the Web is real, but it is happening at a surface level. All the content you love and want is still there. They are just harder to discover cause FAANG companies got a nuclear powered shit firehose spraying bullshit all over the place.

There are many ways to fight this and in this blog post, I'll outline what I am doing and try to convince you to do the same. Yes, this post has an agenda, a biased human wrote it.

TL;DR: We need to get back into blogging. We need to put care and effort into the Blogosphere.

A human-centric Web, in my own opinion, is one that is made by people to be browsed by people.

Owning our own platforms

The fine folks at the IndieWeb been hammering at this for a very long time: On Social Networks such as Facebook or YouTube, you don't own your platform. You're just feeding a machine that will decide to show your content or not to people, depending on how much their shareholders can make out of your work and passion.

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can be distributed to any platform, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control

You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

— Source: IndieWeb

I'm not advocating for you to stop using these bad social networks. You do whatever you want to do. I'm urging you to also own your own little corner on the Web by making a little blog. What will you post into it? Well, whatever you want. The same stuff you post elsewhere.

A blog doesn't need to be anything more complicated than your random scribblings and things you want to share with the world. I know there are many people that treat it as a portfolio to highlight their best self and promote themselves, if that is you too, go forward and do it! If that is not you, you can still have a blog and have fun.

There are thousands of ways to start a blog, let me list some that I think are a good way to go:

• Micro.Blog: A simple and powerful blogging platform by people who actually love blogs. You need a subscription for it, but it can be as cheap as 1 buck per-month.
• Jekyll using Github Pages: If you're a developer and already know a bit about Git, you can quickly spin a blog using Jekyll and Github Pages. That allows you to start a blog for free.
• Wordpress: It pains me to write this one. I don't like Wordpress but I understand it is an easy way to start blogging for free.
• Blogger: Blogger still exists! A simple way to create a blog.

These are just some ways to do it. There are many more.

When you start your own blog, you're joining the conversation. You don't need the blessing of a social network to post your own content online. You certainly don't need to play their algorithm game. Join the conversation as you are and not as these companies want you to be. The Web becomes better when you are your authentic self online.

Post about all the things that interest you. It doesn't matter if you're mixing food recipes with development tips. You contain multitudes.

Share the blog posts and content creators that you like. Talk about your shared passions on your blog. Create connections.

Subscribing to websites

The way to avoid doomscrolling and horrible algorithmic timelines is to curate your own feed subscriptions. Instead of relying on social networks and search engines to surface content for you, you can subscribe to the websites you want to check often. Many websites offer feeds in RSS or Atom formats and you can use a feed reader to keep track of them.

There are many feed readers out there (heck, even I made one, more about it later). Let me show you some cool ones:

• Feedly: A SaaS that is liked by many. Create an account and subscribe to your blogs from any Web device you got.
• NetNewsWire: Polished macOS app that has been the gold standard for feed readers for more than a decade. It is FOSS.
• Akregator: From our friends at KDE, a FOSS Desktop feed reader for Linux and Windows.
• Miniflux: a minimalist feed reader. You can join their SaaS or self-host it.
• Rad Reader: A minimalist desktop reader for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
• BlogCat: Yep, I made this. More about this later. It is an add-on for Firefox that adds blogging features to the browser.

Once you're in control of your own feed, you step away from algorithmic timelines. You can use feed readers to subscribe not only to blogs, but your favourite creators on YouTube and other platforms too.

If the website you want to subscribe to does not offer a feed, check out services like rss.app and others to try to convert it into a feed you can use on your feed reader of choice.

With time, you'll collect many subscriptions and your Web experience will be filled with people instead of bots.

Use opml exporting and importing from your feed reader to share interesting blogs with your friends and readers. Word of mouth and grassroot connections between people in the blogosphere is how we step out of this shit.

Learn a bit of HTML to add a blogroll link to your template. Sharing is caring.

BlogCat, my take on this problem

As I mentioned before, I have been thinking about this for a long time. I suspect I might have created one of the first blogging clients on MacOS 8 (yeah the screenshot is from MacOS 9).

I have no idea how many times I implemented a feed reader, a blogging client, or a little blogging CMS. Even this blog you're reading right now is a home grown Lua-based blogging CMS I made in an afternoon.

BlogCat is my latest experiment. It is an add-on for Firefox that adds blogging features to the browser. It aims to reduce the friction between blogging and Web Browsing by making weblogs a first-class citizen inside your user agent.

You can subscribe to websites, import and export OPML, all from inside the browser.

You can have a calm experience checking the latest posts from the websites you follow.

Being a part of the conversation is also easy cause BlogCat supports posting to Micropub-enabled sites and also microblogging to Bluesky and Mastodon. It uses a handy sidebar so you can compose your post while browsing the web.

I been using it for a couple weeks now and am enjoying it a lot. Maybe you will enjoy it too. Anyway, this is not a post about BlogCat, but this post is what originally inspired BlogCat.

As I drafted this post weeks ago and mused about the Web I want and the features I want on Web Browsers, I realised I knew how to make them. Instead of simply shouting about it, I decided to build it myself.

You too can be a part of the conversation. You too can help build the Web you want. Let's walk away from the enshitfication of the Web by linking hands across the blogosphere.