What does the future of blogging look like?

Mastodon reminded me how fun microblogging can be. I think the future of blogging is still found in the details, in the not-so-bloggy platform divergence patterns we've seen in the last two decades. Blogging platform as identity maybe.

It's like asking what the future of writing is, in a way. On the one hand--the future has never looked brighter. On the other hand--wtf are we even talking about in particular, and why are you shopping for typewriters?!

To identify a better blogging platform I'd start with subjective identity characteristics. What do you like (who cares that everybody thinks the world likes what they do) and what platforms really fit that style well? That's the money for that platform. We are still zooming in on parts of the greater fractal and what they can mean for little sections of the population.

There is Mirror.xyz that is growing fast. It's practical to use if you want to monetize your content. Payments are enabled by blockchain tech (Optimism/Ethereum). It's becoming a challenger of Substack in the web3/crypto ecosystem.

Blogs with photos and videos are being replaced by Vlogs hosted on primarly video-based platforms. À la YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. But these content distribution platforms promote short videos because of users's short attention span.

I think that people who like traditional blogs (i.e.: long reads) won't become attracted to those visual blogging forms. Substack and Medium used good strategies to onboard them.

Support for text to speech and podcast feed generation with extra tags for making sure emotions come across as the author intends and should be fully controllable by the author.

I’m reading fiction at night but during the day I’m to busy to read (one year old son), but I have plenty of time to listen (dishes, laundry and so on).

Text to speech has been good enough with tweaking for a while now (IBM had one with good tagging), but not without, so some effort would need to be put into it by the creator but this also creates an opportunity that cannot be stolen by browsers.

Sarcasm, high or low pitch, enthusiastic or sad, these things can be controlled.

Every blogger is different.

If "blogging" is about developing an audience and building a business, Substack, and LinkedIn are the dominant platforms that are the places to be, because that's where the readers are.

There are lots of great technnical blogs that provide useful content, but are written for the writer's own references and notes, not for a broader audience. Those people likely won't change how they do things.

Self hosting for control and not being at the whims of corporate content and monetization strategy... if the internet moves closer to its roots of federation. For discoverability, being able to mirror to topical communities is nice, like dev.to

My prediction is that, within the next couple of years, we'll see blogs becoming a part of the fediverse. New posts will show up in your followers feed and they can boost, star and comment. These interactions will show up below the post. The first federated blogging system will probably be written i PHP and will be quite simple to self-host.

That's what I'm dreaming of, anyway :)

By the Lindy effect, the future of blogging is the same as the past, plain text on sites with optional images and videos, but the primary value will still be in the text itself.

I already avoid clicking on Substack links so I am hoping that's not the future.

Interactive content + games.