Is community the blogging platform’s secret weapon?
Not so long ago, bloggers used social media to share their posts and build audiences. While social media is unlikely to go away any time soon, people do seem to be falling out of love with it, if for no other reason than most of the mainstream social platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, etc.) tend to throttle any posts with external links. If bloggers can’t share external links for fear of being pushed into the digital ghetto, then how the hell are they supposed to be promote their sites?
Bloggers have plenty of free and paid options for creating their own blogs: WordPress, Ghost, Blogger, Bear, Mataroa, GitHub Pages . . . But most of these options provide little more than hosting and maybe email newsletters. (For the record, this point is not an insult, because these providers don’t claim to offer more. So no harm, no foul.)
These options offer little in regard to promoting your writing outside of their platforms. Writers have countless options when it comes to owning their audiences. But what good is owning an audience if that audience is zero?
Social media is a hassle for some of us. It’s an inexhaustible firehose of noise that’s impossible to keep on top of;
But some blogging platforms, such as write.as and micro.blog, do offer other ways to share your writing without the aid of social media. write.as in particular has read.write.as, where you can read all public posts by anyone on the platform. micro.blog is in many ways a social network powered by blogs and RSS feeds.
Online life is changing. Many of us, once enamored with social media, are now turned off by it. The internet has always been about connecting people—and I think that’s still true. These days we focus on the negatives of the internet (social media and the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news, etc.). But we can’t forget or discount the good that comes with building connections with like-minded people—connections that may have never happened without the power of the World Wide Web.
While those of us with public blogs may not default to doing whatever it takes to get more clicks and eyeballs, we still want to be read. Maybe we don’t want to be read by everyone, but we want to be read by those who matter to us. How do we find these people without social media?
Is this need an opportunity for blogging platforms? Might it be a differentiator in the future? Is this why Substack has basically built a social network (Notes) into its own platform?
I myself don’t need a million readers. I’m not searching for a big audience. I’m just searching for my audience. But that audience is hard to find without social media, unless you’re going to play the SEO game. There’s nothing wrong with leaning on SEO—it’s a valid strategy. It’s just not a strategy I want to pursue.
Since I started blogging again in 2018, I’ve hosted my writing on multiple sites, including write.as, micro.blog, Mataroa, GitHub Pages, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten. The best engagement I got in that period came when I was hosted on write.as or micro.blog, blogging platforms with built-in communities.
I don’t know how exactly blogging platforms pull this off. And I don’t know how write.as can build upon its foundation. But I can’t help wondering if the next innovation in blogging has nothing to do with Markdown or image hosting or newsletters. Maybe the opportunity lies in simply getting writers in front of readers who matter without requiring them to whore themselves out on the social networks that often feel like far more work than they’re worth.
Jake LaCaze wants to see people connecting with people online.
