New Old Internet
I’ve been searching for nice, plain blogging software lately.
This is a total old person rant here, but 20 years ago, the internet was a much simpler place, and I mean that in the sense that websites were something that your average non-programmer person could easily have and tinker around with on weekends. Now, it feels like everything has 5,000 features you don’t need, uses at least three different programming languages, and assumes you have a degree in web development.
Well, I didn’t really find the blogging software I was looking for yet, but I did find Bear Blog and holy crap, this thing is like a modern day Diaryland.
If you weren't familiar with it, Diaryland was probably one of the earliest platforms for what would become blogging, from around 1999: It displayed one entry per page by default, but you could mess around with the layout a bit. There was a feed of other people's recently updated diaries, but there was no ability comment on them or anything.
I mean, I talk about it in the past sense, but the site is still there. It's still technically functioning and some people still update their diaries, but a lot of the features are broken, things aren't maintained, and you can't even sign up anymore.
Anyway, just browsing through the Discovery Feed here kind of gave me the same sense of browsing people's diaries back then: Nobody’s trying to monetize anything, because there's no ads. Nobody’s trying to become an internet celebrity, because it's a small site. Nobody's arguing, because there's no comments/reblogs/whatever. Just a lot of writing that's personal in nature, either about general life things or deep thoughts or just things that interest people.
It’s just so genuine. It's very refreshing.