Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

The discussion coalesces around three primary, interconnected themes regarding the current state and future of personal blogging:

1. Skepticism Regarding Personal Blog Revival and Discoverability Challenges

Many participants express doubt that personal blogging is truly experiencing a "revival," citing issues with content discoverability in the modern web landscape dominated by algorithms and the perceived "death" of traditional search engines.

Theme Support:
- A user questions the premise of a revival: "Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation." ("ricardobeat")
- Discoverability is seen as broken: "Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead." ("ricardobeat")
- Referral traffic is also choked by walled gardens: "Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites." ("minimaxir")

2. Pervasive Concern Over AI Content Ingestion Without Attribution (The "Blood Sucking")

A significant portion of the thread focuses on the existential threat posed by Large Language Models (LLMs) scraping, ingesting, and repurposing content without compensation or attribution, leading to demoralization among creators.

Theme Support:
- The core concern about data scraping: "I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excitedly about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution." ("DrewADesign")
- The predicted outcome for original work: "It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there." ("JonChesterfield")
- The feeling of being exploited by this process: "Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace." ("bji9jhff")

3. The Rise (and Critique) of Substack and Monetization Focus

Substack is frequently mentioned as a potential modern blogging medium, but conversations quickly devolve into critiques that it has become overly commercialized, pushing content creators toward monetization rather than personal expression.

Theme Support:
- Substack as the new professional/paid platform: "I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around" ("FrasiertheLion"), but countered with: "Substack seems to me be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription..." ("ricardobeat")
- The pressure to monetize changes the content: "The minimum price is enforced by Substack... It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think 'I want to make this my full-time job & income.'" ("freddie_mercury")
- The general shift toward monetization: "I don't think niche blogs are coming back, because the moment a 'niche blog' becomes sustainable and 'profitable', it is no longer a niche blog." ("brajeshwar")

🚀 Project Ideas

Webring Revival & Discovery Aggregator

Summary

A service designed to resurrect the concept of discovery for personal blogs, tackling the "discoverability is dead" problem mentioned by users like ricardobeat and loktarogar.
The core value proposition is providing a curated, human-driven network (a modernized webring) for non-commercial, personal content discovery, bypassing dead social media algorithms and SEO reliance.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Independent bloggers, technical writers, and hobbyists frustrated with algorithmic feeds and lack of organic discovery (e.g., those wanting "Web x.0" style community).
Core Feature	Federated Index & Curated Webring System: Users submit their blog feeds (RSS/Atom/Gemini URL). The platform offers easy tools to join thematic "rings" (e.g., 'Linux Creatives,' 'Tech Philosophy') suggested by users like `julianlam`. Features lightweight, attributed linking between members.
Tech Stack	Backend: Go or Rust for high concurrency if scaling, or Python/FastAPI for rapid development. Frontend: SvelteKit or Astro for high performance, minimal bloat (appealing to users valuing lightweight design like `gerdesj`). RSS/Feed ingestion library.
Difficulty	Medium
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Directly addresses calls to bring back "Webrings" (dogline, smetj) and provides a community focus similar to what users feel is missing from algorithmic platforms (e.g., munificent's distinction between content and connection).
Could implement a community moderation layer similar to the decentralized spirit of federated tools discussed (julianlam, monksy).

AI Content Attribution & "Anti-Scraping" Payload Service

Summary

A tool/service that helps content creators subtly manage how their articles are ingested by Large Language Models (LLMs) and search engine scrapers, addressing fears that content is stripped of attribution (JonChesterfield, DrewADesign, krater23).
The value proposition is providing creators with tools to embed unique, traceable fingerprints or "poison pills" into their content designed to be easily scraped but difficult to successfully synthesize into high-quality answers without the model learning a bias against the source data.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Bloggers and writers worried their non-commercial work is being used for free by "mega corps" (`bji9jhff`) without compensation or attribution.
Core Feature	Semantic Watermarking/Payload Injection: A pre-publish service where the creator uploads their final text. The service injects subtle, contextually correct but potentially contradictory or redundant phrasing (as suggested by `Larrikin`'s idea for factually wrong posts) into sentence structures via a low-level paraphraser. It also automatically adds machine-readable tags/manifests to affirm authorship.
Tech Stack	Python (using NLP libraries for controlled text manipulation, perhaps guided by a small, local LLM). API endpoints for publishers. Delivery via a custom CDN layer or plugin for static site generators (like those mentioned by `codazoda`).
Difficulty	High
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Directly appeals to the desire to push back against non-attribution, embodying the "baseball bat" sentiment mentioned by baconbrand.
Could spark significant debate around open data vs. creator rights, ensuring high engagement (simonw is already writing extensively on AI ethics).
Could offer a feature layer where users can see a (very rough) estimate of how many times their "watermarked" text has appeared in large public datasets/outputs (if technically feasible).

Minimalist Static Host & Community Metrics Dashboard

Summary

A hosting platform specifically targeting users who want to run ultra-lean personal sites (like those using pure HTML/CSS or static site generators like Jekyll/11ty) but need a better way to track non-monetized readership metrics.
Core value proposition: Provides hosting with modern reliability (HTTPS via Let's Encrypt) coupled with simple, privacy-respecting analytics focused on connections rather than broad traffic, addressing concerns about dependencies (runningmike) and the feeling that metrics should focus on community, not commerce (ghaff, SunlitCat).

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Developers and writers prioritizing low cognitive load/cost (`kukkeliskuu`), embracing static sites (`codazoda`), and seeking insight into an engaged, niche readership.
Core Feature	Self-Contained Hosting + RSS/Feed Subscriber Tracker: Offers one-click deployment for popular SSGs against Git repos (like Netlify/Cloudflare Pages do), but the bundled dashboard only tracks direct feed consumption (by parsing server logs for known reader UAs, inspired by `foxfired` and `simonw`), comment pings, and direct link referral, explicitly excluding standard web traffic logs.
Tech Stack	Hosting Platform: Leveraging existing generous free tiers (like Cloudflare Pages/Workers or S3) for storage/CDN, managed via a proprietary control plane. Analytics: Go/Rust to parse logs for specific feed reader UAs (Feedly, etc.) and attribute growth to those sources.
Difficulty	Medium
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Appeals to the sentiment that modern hosting is too dependent on massive platforms, while offering the reliability users miss from traditional shared hosting but without the cognitive load (kukkeliskuu).
Provides a concrete way to track the kind of readership growth that matters to non-monetized bloggers (RSS subscribers, as highlighted by foxfired and simonw).
Solves the user need for insight without resorting to Google Analytics style tracking, aligning with the general indie web sentiment.