I have been trying to encourage people to write and read more blogs and moving away especially from corporate social media, but as always discoverability is an issue. It's tough enough to "go viral" on a big social media site with a recommendation algorithm, but being found on the open internet unless someone knows exactly what they are looking for is difficult.
Obviously, there existed (and still exist) mechanisms through which content is recommended and discovered, even in the absence of some AI with the training regimen and the profit motive of a mega-corporation.
In the pre-social media era and even prior to the rise of big search engines, there were people curating resources for others to find. Some people set up websites purely to document interesting and worthwhile websites. These "web directories" established catalogs of links to content all over the web and were often human-curated, meaning that there was someone who made a conscious choice to put each website on there.
Nowadays web directories are pretty rare, but some people do still maintain them. Some are also automated, such as the Owncast Directory which maintains a kind of combined view of livestreams hosted on individual Owncast server instances.
However, content was not found merely via web directories. Blog rolls were another mechanism for content discovery and they operated on more or less the same principle as how public follow lists work on social media: people would publish links to the content that they enjoyed on their own website, so that if someone enjoyed your blog and maybe wanted to find similar stuff, they could look into the blog roll and see what was on there.
These blog rolls range from just a list of links to some pretty elaborate schemes, where a set of buttons at the top or bottom of the website will take you through what is essentially a carousel of linked blogs.
I have been wanting to set up one myself, so that people could find cool stuff via my website too, but one of my problems is that I am pretty lazy to actively manage that kind of stuff, so if it was handled separate from my other routines, it would probably go unmaintained pretty quickly.
However, I came up with a little hack that I think is pretty smart. By chance, I moved my RSS/Atom feeds into Elfeed and elfeed-org some time ago and that presented an opportunity. My website content is mostly written in org-mode files, which is the exact same format as elfeed-org uses. Basically, elfeed-org allows me to write a plain text file which contains headings with links and then converts that into a list of feeds for Elfeed to query.
So, what I realized I could do was make a copy of my elfeed-org and push it into my website every time I build it. This would automatically make it available as a page. And because elfeed-org just looks at headings with links, I could annotate the page as much as I wanted and apply my stylesheets to it to make it look nice.
I basically just added this command into the Makefile I use to construct my website:
recommendations:
cp ~/org/elfeed.org content/blogroll.org
You can check out the resulting page here.
This approach is definitely very lazy and has some caveats. The biggest of which is that the resulting page will link directly to RSS feeds, making it more of a "RSS directory" of sorts. I might look into ways to insert links to the front page of the websites as well as their feeds, but I haven't done it yet. But the biggest benefit of this lazy approach is that it forces me to actively maintain it. If I put a website into my feed reader, it automatically makes its way to my "blog roll" when I next build the site. So, as long as I am writing any updates to any of the pages, the newest set of feeds gets posted too.
With a little bit of extra work, a similar approach can probably be adapted to other feed readers as well, although you might need to create a script to convert from the feed reader's native format to markdown, org or HTML to get useful pages out of it. But, if you also have trouble bothering to separately curate a blog roll, I think this approach might work for you too.
Happy blogging and browsing!
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