Expanding blogroll.org Feedback Needed

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As the current steward of blogroll.org I think it’s my duty to try make the site better. And one thing I’m currently considering is to branch out and start including other categories on the site, not just personal site/blogs

Don’t get me wrong, the home and core of the site will still be the personal web. Because blogs are awesome and more people should start a blog. But, the good web is not just blogs. And so I was thinking it might be a good thing to expand.

The question is: expand in which direction? Should I start collecting zines? Newsletters? Magazines? I’m VERY open to feedback so I’d love to hear from the people here what’s worth listing and highlighting.

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hmm! i think that depends a bit on what you see as like… the main “point” / principles?

  • if the emphasis is on finding cool and interesting people online who are blogging, you could expand to recommend blogs on other platforms like tumblr or substack
    • but if the emphasis is on promoting more obscure/“indie” platforms that would be no good obviously!
  • do you want to link only free things? free with ads? free with optional subscription/patreon/conspicuous donation links? partially free with some paywalled content?
  • do you want to focus on work by individuals (the Personal aspect of blogs being most important), or would multi-contributor stuff work too (because the indie part is more important than the individual/personal)?
  • do you want only currently-active and updating sites to emphasize who is “out there right now”, or to include older/inactive/archived blogs to emphasize “there’s lots of cool things to read on line”?

lots of directions…! i think any/all of these could be interesting. expanding to include older blogs that are no longer regularly updated would be cool as many directories these days are biased towards active/recent/new material. helping people find blogs that aren’t on indie platforms helps make the web more interconnected and less (indieweb voice) ~Siloed~…

zines tend not to be “active” or “regular” in the way a blog is, so if activity and regular updates are important i think newsletters would make more sense in terms of expansion! newsletters are pretty similar to blogs i think, so it makes a lot of sense to include those imo.

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If you want to collect newsletters, I’d be disappointed if you included newsletters run on Substack, given how they’re now a “social app” and still not only tolerate but profit from far-right publications like Aporia and far-right writers like Richard Spencer, Cremieux (Jordan Lasker), and Richard Hanania (aka Richard Hoste).

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Tiny thing but I wish you had a button or one of those larger banner haha or some other images I could host on my own site to link to you! And it’d be nice for blogs who art part of blogroll to have the option to include a ‘part of blogroll’ button too! That’s how I find other listings a lot of the time!

I think zines would be nice to expand on too. There’s so many zine projects out there on the indieweb, but I am honestly unsure of how to find them. I think expanding on this by listing collectives of artists would be cool too. I know there’s sites and projects out there hosted by cool groups, but can never find them.

I find including Newsletters to not be extremely necessary since so many technically fall under the ‘blog’ category already haha!

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You know me well enough to know I hate substack as much as you do :)
When I say newsletters I think about solo run, newsletters with custom designs run on sane newsletter platforms.

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if the emphasis is on finding cool and interesting people online who are blogging, you could expand to recommend blogs on other platforms like tumblr or substack

So I don’t rally have a policy right now against including blogs on those platforms. I usually try to avoid blogs that don’t run on their own domain name and that’s about it. I don’t always apply that rule because there are blogs that use 3rd level domains but generally speaking, I try to avoid it.

I care more about the content and the people than the platforms honestly. I don’t really care what people use as long as they use something.

do you want to link only free things? free with ads? free with optional subscription/patreon/conspicuous donation links? partially free with some paywalled content?

I try not to feature blogs that are obvious commercial projects. If every page is a paywalled article that’s not worth featuring imo. But if someone has a blog and some paid content on the side it’s totally fine by me.

do you want to focus on work by individuals (the Personal aspect of blogs being most important), or would multi-contributor stuff work too (because the indie part is more important than the individual/personal)

As I said the core of the site is and will remain personal sites. That’s not gonna change. The home will continue featuring personal blogs. I have no interest in changing that. When I say I’m considering expanding what I mean is adding a navigation somewhere that would take you to a different part of the site where other content might be collected.

That said, I’d not mind opening up the door to sites that are not solo run.

do you want only currently-active and updating sites to emphasize who is “out there right now”, or to include older/inactive/archived blogs to emphasize “there’s lots of cool things to read on line”?

When something is submitted I do try to make sure is at least a somewhat active site but I definitely don’t go back and check to make sure a site is still actively maintained. I only remove sites that go offline, for obvious reason.

As for zines, I agree with you and that’s a problem I was thinking. They’re not very regular and so listing them might be kinda pointless.

@ophanimkei yeah I definitely need to make a button for blogroll. And for my own site. But I tried a few times and I’m never happy with the result. I also thought about making a blogroll webring. That could also be kinda cool.

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okay, cool!

maybe you could have a section for gathering things people can write blog posts for ! that could encompass digital publications, zines, blog carnivals, creative challenges, events, collaborative blogs, that sort of thing? people could submit communities they’ve made on dreamwidth, calls for submissions, etc.

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that’s truuuuue. im gonna make a wikipost for zines now tbh, i think it’d be a nice directory to have

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theres a few in the resources masterlist (at the very end) you can already use

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Sticking to blogs sounds fine by me, especially since there’s so many out there. I think the rule about avoiding tumblr sounds good but I’m not sure about not allowing blogs that aren’t self-hosted. I always enjoy checking the Discovery section on bearblog.dev.

I think that if you want to expand, maybe non-commercial blogs and such that aren’t strictly personal? Some of my favourite blogs post about things like history or science or something.

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Sticking to blogs sounds fine by me, especially since there’s so many out there. I think the rule about avoiding tumblr sounds good but I’m not sure about not allowing blogs that aren’t self-hosted. I always enjoy checking the Discovery section on bearblog.dev.

Oh, I have nothing against blogs that are hosted. I just try avoid 3rd level domains. You can 100% have your own domain name on a platforms like bearblog for example.

The reason why I do that is because I do believe that if you don’t “own“ your own urls, you don’t really own your content. URLs is how the is built and if your content lives at abc.substack.com for example, if tomorrow substack goes down, your content is effectively gone because all your URLs are gone.

As for non-personal, those are already more than welcome. There’s a bunch on the blogroll right now that are definitely not personal blogs. Just today I included one that’s all abut orchids for example.

Some of my favourite blogs post about things like history or science or something.

Feel free to submit them to the site!

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Not sure if you know this one: https://www.zineomatic.com

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This is very cool! I was unaware of this wowow.

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I also agree. It’s actually why I bought the ophanimkei domain earlier in its likespan.

People who own their own domains I think are more likely to move elsewhere if their host disintegrates because they have more reason too… I personally think hundreds of blogs on Tumblr will disappear and never return if that host every goes down as someone who loves Tumblr.

Addendum: “loves” tumblr

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You are 100% correct. And that’s all I care about. It’s also how we keep the web healthy overall. Because we need good content out there.

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I think this is overstating the case on a few different fronts.

  • You don’t own your URL. You rent it. What you rent can always be lost or taken away from you.
  • This can happen to paid URLs in many ways. Sometimes people miss their payments and lose control of their domain names. Sometimes the top-level domain itself might be imperiled or stolen. Sometimes the top-level domain can fall into the hands of a group you refuse to do business with, such as the Taliban. So while renting a domain name can be helpful overall, it’s not a guarantee or a perfect way to avoid all risk.
  • Taking measures against link rot isn’t the same as ownership of a blog and its posts. If you keep a backup of your blog and get booted off your free web host, you still own your posts and can still reupload them elsewhere. It’s a pain, of course, but I think it’s worth making a distinction between link rot and data loss.

Don’t get me wrong though, if you want to restrict the scope of Blogroll dot org to blogs with rented domain names, I’m all for that. Many of those blogs are indie blogs that don’t benefit from the built-in platform search functions on sites like Tumblr, Wordpress, Substack, etc., and so they could use the extra boost.

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As @Coyote points out, renting a domain doesn’t guarantee ownership. I own the contents of starbreaker.org not because I’m renting a domain, but because I retain local copies of my website with redundant backups. If I lose my domain, I can rent another. If Nearly Free Speech goes out of business or gives me the boot, I can set up shop elsewhere.

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You don’t own your URL. You rent it. What you rent can always be lost or taken away from you.

Technically correct but it’s a distinction I personally don’t care much about because…

So while renting a domain name can be helpful overall, it’s not a guarantee or a perfect way to avoid all risk.

It’s better than the alternative which is renting it from a company and have no control whatsoever on it. So yes, you can forget to renew it, yes you can get a weird tld that is then kidnapped by the Talibans but those are all extreme events.

If you get a “normal“ TLD and you keep paying for it, you can reasonably expect that domain to stay there and you can also expect to do with it what you want.

Taking measures against link rot isn’t the same as ownership of a blog and its posts. If you keep a backup of your blog and get booted off your free web host, you still own your posts and can still reupload them elsewhere. It’s a pain, of course, but I think it’s worth making a distinction between link rot and data loss.

Again, technically correct. From the web’s perspective, your content moving to a different domain name means your content is gone. If I wrote something and linked to your site, that link is now broken. People will have no way to know what that content was and it still existing, somewhere, at a different location, doesn’t help.

Don’t get me wrong though, if you want to restrict the scope of Blogroll dot org to blogs with rented domain names, I’m all for that.

They’re all rented so I guess that’s not even an option. And the blogroll is not restricted to that. It’s a very loose policy I try to follow but there’s plenty of blogs that are currently hosted on 3rd levels.

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At the risk of sounding like a wannabe academic (but maybe that’s okay since if I’m being honest with myself I am a wannabe academic), I think of domains in terms of identity and data in terms of content.

Renting a domain allows me to control my online identity to the extent possible. Storing my data locally and backing it up means that I control my content. Doing both means that I control the association between my identity and my content (maybe that’s a way to define “online presence”). So if either has to move for whatever reason, I can reestablish the association and everyone can still find my stuff. My online presence is resilient.

All of which is to say that I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a loose preference for personal blogs whose authors control their online identity. I think that could also guide how you branch out. Maybe it can be about the emphasis of a submission rather than the medium.

If a zine/magazine/newsletter/whatever gives a glimpse into something that some person is passionate about, then it might be a good candidate. It helps make a connection with that person. If it’s more of a collection of other people’s content that doesn’t let you know much about the person who created it, then that might be a bad fit.

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Substack going down overnight would also be an extreme event. I’m rooting against that place too, but my point is just that the difference is relative, not absolute.

This can be addressed in at least some cases by contacting people to let them know. That’s one of the reasons I like to amass lists of where my pages have been linked – which isn’t a 100% cure-all, naturally, but that’s a scenario where it’s possible to have some agency at least.

The reason I’m pointing this out, just so you know, isn’t just about technicalities for technicalities’ sake. It’s because I’ve noticed a pattern of custom domain names being over-emphasized, and there are times when that can cross a line from inaccurate to negligent. That’s something I expect I might write more about some other time.