When you're building something, you develop a kind of radar for it. You start noticing references everywhere — in conversations, in articles, in throwaway lines buried in posts about something else entirely. Over the past year of building Blogs Are Back, we've been collecting links. Blog posts about blogging coming back. Essays about RSS mattering again. Observations from people who've been around long enough to see cycles repeat.
What's interesting isn't that these posts exist. It's that they're coming from completely different corners of the internet, written by people with different histories and motivations, and they're all circling the same idea.
The Friction Was the Feature
Elizabeth Spiers — founding editor of Gawker, someone who was there for the first wave — wrote a piece for Talking Points Memo that reframes something we tend to get wrong about the early blogosphere. The usual narrative is that blogging was great despite its limitations. Spiers argues the opposite: it was great because of them.
Her central metaphor is sharp. A blog was "a house you built that requires some effort to visit." Social media is an unregulated town square. The effort mattered. If someone wanted to troll you, they had to build their own site and hope people showed up. Cross-linking between blogs required actually reading and engaging with someone's argument, not just quote-tweeting with a dunk. The discourse was slower, messier, more personal — and it worked.
What hits hardest is how she describes the relationship between writers and readers. Early Gawker's audience didn't just passively scroll. They sent detailed critiques, tips, corrections. The friction of the medium filtered for people who actually cared. That's not a bug — that's the entire model.
Infrastructure, Not Nostalgia
Ben Werdmuller, who works at ProPublica and has been blogging at werd.io for years, comes at this from an infrastructure angle. His argument is that RSS never went away — we just stopped seeing it.
Podcasts are RSS. News aggregation apps are RSS. Half the enterprise data pipelines you've never heard of are RSS. The protocol is everywhere, quietly doing its job while we declared it dead. Werdmuller's comparison to SMTP — email's underlying protocol — is apt. Nobody writes blog posts about whether email is "coming back." It just works. RSS is the same, except it's been waiting for the application layer to catch up.
His framing matters because it shifts the conversation. This isn't about convincing people to adopt some retro technology. It's about recognizing that the infrastructure already exists and building better things on top of it. Connect RSS to ActivityPub, to the AT Protocol, to whatever comes next. The plumbing is already there.
"Every RSS subscription represents a direct relationship between publisher and consumer," he writes. No middleman. No algorithm. Just a URL that says here's my stuff, come get it whenever you want.
Personal Blogs Are Step One
Over at Disassociated — a site that's been around since 1997, which gives you some credibility on this topic — there's a piece that accepts the premise of the personal blog revival and then pushes further. Okay, personal blogs are back. Great. But the web also lost something else: quality niche blogs.
The argument is that the early 2000s had an ecosystem of focused, independently-run sites covering specific topics with genuine expertise. Not content farms. Not SEO plays. Real people writing about things they knew deeply, building trust with readers over years. That layer of the web got hollowed out by platforms and, more recently, by AI-generated content that's optimized for search ranking rather than actually helping anyone.
Personal blogs are the foundation, but they're not the whole building. The web also needs people willing to go deep on a subject and stick with it — something that's become harder to sustain when the default distribution channel is an algorithm that rewards novelty over depth.
It's a useful corrective. The "blogs are back" conversation can sometimes feel like it's only about personal expression, about reclaiming your corner of the internet. That matters. But there's also a practical need: we need trustworthy, independent sources of information on specific topics, and the blog format is still the best container for that.
The Quiet Return
Eran Sandler's piece, "Are We Quietly Returning to the Era of Feeds?", captures something the others hint at but don't quite name. The return isn't loud. There's no single moment, no flagship product launch, no viral trend. It's just... happening. Quietly. Organically.
He traces the original arc — RSS promised centralized content consumption, website owners got nervous about losing traffic, social networks absorbed the discovery function, mobile pushed everything toward apps and notifications — and then notices that the wheel is turning again. Structured, open formats are resurfacing because they're practical. Markdown is everywhere because it's lightweight and portable. Feeds work because they're simple and interoperable.
"It's funny how things come full circle," he writes. And that's maybe the most honest framing. This isn't a revolution. It's a correction. The web tried a different approach for a while — centralized platforms, algorithmic curation, walled gardens — and enough people have felt the downsides that the old patterns are finding new life.
What We See from Here
Four writers, four different histories, four different angles. And they all land in roughly the same place: the feed model works, blogs are the right shape for thoughtful writing, and the infrastructure is already here waiting to be used.
From where we're sitting — actively building a tool for this exact use case — a few things stand out.
The audience already exists. We didn't have to create demand. People show up already knowing what RSS is, already frustrated with algorithmic feeds, already looking for something better. The shift Sandler describes as "quiet" is quiet because it's driven by individual decisions, not marketing campaigns. Someone uninstalls Twitter, starts a blog, subscribes to a few feeds, tells a friend. Multiply that a few thousand times and you've got a movement that doesn't need a manifesto.
The tools have caught up. Spiers is right that friction was a feature of early blogging — but the wrong kinds of friction held it back too. Setting up an RSS reader in 2008 was genuinely annoying. Today, the reading experience can be as smooth as any social feed while preserving everything that makes the model better: chronological order, no tracking, no ads, your data stays yours.
The niche blog gap is real. The Disassociated piece touches on something we think about a lot. Our directory is mostly tech-focused right now because that's the community we emerged from. But the need for quality, focused blogs extends into every subject. Gardening, cooking, woodworking, local politics, whatever. The format works for anything where depth and trust matter more than virality.
Nobody needs to be convinced. This is the part we keep coming back to. The people writing these posts aren't trying to persuade anyone to adopt a new technology. They're observing something that's already underway. Werdmuller isn't pitching RSS — he's pointing out that it never left. Spiers isn't arguing for a return to blogging — she's explaining why the original model worked. The arguments are descriptive, not prescriptive.
That feels right. The best case for blogs isn't an argument. It's just a good blog post.
If you've been collecting links too, we'd love to hear about them. Find us on Bluesky or drop us a note. And if you're looking for blogs worth reading, explore the directory.