We have platforms which make it easy to set up self-posted blogs, we just need a way to make them more discoverable. Which is what Twitter, Reddit, and especially Medium (which I imagine WriteFreely was inspired by) had in mind.

This is something I said before: the reason existing platforms dominate the market is because they have the most users. Most people create blogs or any other kind of content because they want to be heard.

The Micropub / Microsub standard follows a similar, even more granular approach (where content types note and article are existent explicitly).

Of course, those alternative network standards are not attracting the broad majority of users yet but this is not a technical problem.

No part of this discovery step is automated or aided by the software.

Personally I think it's a big oversight in the ActivityPub protocol.. but then again, ActivityPub is more oversights than it is features.

I think the problem with the web as it is now is that it's too easy to discover sites. Which is why more and more (though not enough) people distrust the large search providers.

Nothing the tech companies have invented carries the weight of word-of-mouth and personal recommendations. You've probably seen it in your own browsing.

Search for something → Open 30 tabs from the search results and look at each one for a fraction of a second.

See a link described on HN → Open one tab and give it a fair shot.

It would be nice to see the return of niche search engines. Want to know something about architecture? Visit architecturesearch.example and when you search for "skyscraper" you get information about tall buildings, and not bad action films and ads for high-heeled shoes.

A niche search engine is a good solution, for niche content you already know about. For discovering new niche content you’d need a really good algorithm (perhaps based on similar niches) or some other system.

I completely agree with you. Discovery still seems to be the hardest problem to solve.

I, as a blog owner, I decided that the best way to contribute solve this problem comes in two ways:

1) By linking more to external sites and talk about websites I like and push for more networking to take place rather than only linking internally to generate more traffic

2) I created https://theforest.link/ as a way to bring back some of the fun in the way we explore the web.

These two won’t obviously solve the problem altogether but I think if more people try their best to spread the word about content worth consuming we can solve the discovery issue without inventing a separate discovery platform.

Also, we should bring back blogrolls

The site is as low tech as it gets. I was just trying to make something fun and help people discover interesting sites.

It’s mostly personal sites/blogs and some indie publication.

Personally I have made my addiction to social media work for me. I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I can't afford $5.00 per month, and happily let ADs subsidize these companies (Twitter, Facebook etc).

I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories of complex user data and very little regulation in place to restrict their use.

Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal data for convenience.

Sorry.