Empty RSS Feeds

Years and years ago, when Google killed its feed reader, I set up Feedly to keep track of blogs. It was already late into the slow death of personal blogs, and now the links are silent, or eaten up by squatters. I would love to time-travel back to the era of moral panic over the Internet Being Forever and let everyone know that the Internet disappears more quickly than we want.

There's no good reason to revive blogging, because its value was in conversation, and the few conversationalists still online have mostly moved to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. I assume the rest, the ones who disappeared, fell silent for the same reasons that I did: privacy issues, the messiness of trying to talk about parenting older children without throwing those children under the bus, maybe just being pulled along by the tides of the Internet.

I love that I was part of a measurable moment in the history of the Internet. I regret that most of that history will be poorly written by people who can find a lot of information about Dooce but not much about all the spaces that have disappeared. It bothers me that the folks who held on the longest will shape the narrative of what we were all doing, when their embrace of branding and scheduled posts and bullshit was never the point for most of us, and maybe even part of the reason why we left.