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Mine (https://xenodium.com) will hit 10 years in November. It started as a single org file for personal notes. One day I decided to export it to HTML as my accesible notes from anywhere. Sorta just became both notes and blog over time… While the tone of the posts may have evolved over time, they still serve as a notes/reference of sorts. The tech behind it hasn’t changed a whole lot. It remains is a single org file (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xenodium/xenodium.github.i...).
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/