Guy LeCharles GonzalezNew year, updated blog roll!
There are several new-to-me blogs in the mix that I discovered in 2025, along with some of my favorite YouTube channels.
All of them will improve your feed in 2026.
"If we want an internet where publishers retain autonomy and readers retain agency, we need to treat #RSS not as legacy plumbing but as strategic infrastructure." @ben
I've been using Inoreader for about a year and am pretty happy with it, while @surf is an intriguing option for blending social feeds and I'd love to be able to add regular RSS feeds, too. (EDIT: You can!)
Not having an RSS feed active is like making Instagram your website. Stop it!
"If we want to see more personal blogs from people beyond the tech world, we have to acknowledge that it’s not only that platforms make it difficult to engage with the wider open web, it is also simply difficult to create your own space on the web. And we haven’t done enough to address that."
@enocc - It's hard to join the Indie Web 💯
I migrated my Bluesky account to #BlackSky, and it was an impressively easy process, one-upping Mastodon for being able to move over all of my posts and media, too.
This is still my main satellite, but at least I've pulled one foot out of Bluesky's predictable (although MUCH faster than expected) downward spiral.
I feel bad for anyone who believed the early beta days would be the long-term experience, but SOCIAL MEDIA is fundamentally broken.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:5woi6h3y7ygxpgygk6jpytau
Had to make some social videos for the day job and used a teleprompter app for the first time because I had a script, so I guess I'm officially a content creator now?
I said many years ago that WordPress had done more to "democratize publishing" than ebooks, or anything that's come since, and my opinion hasn't really changed.
YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok have had a huge impact, but making videos is much harder than writing.
I'd love to see blogging make a comeback.
Ironically, without the "newsletter" posts, I probably wouldn't have ever written most of those other posts.
Years ago, they would have just been ephemeral tweets stripped of all context, or more recently, passing thoughts never documented at all.
The "newsletter" (basically a link blog) gave me a schedule and helped shift my online reading away from doomscrolling, which helped reestablish the mental space for writing about other things that I'd lost to Twitter over the years.
It's funny that my "newsletter" reinvigorated my blog a few years ago, but looking at my YTD stats, none of those posts are in my top 10.
That's most likely because I include the entire "newsletter" in the email, while regular posts only have the first few paragraphs.
The "newsletter" posts don't get much search traffic, either, while the more focused ones do, particularly Rogue Trader, Buscaglia, and (oddly) Authors Equity. (Search isn't dead yet!)
Nowadays, my blog is my hub once again, with Mastodon and LinkedIn as my main satellites.
I reluctantly check in on Bluesky now and then because comics and libraries have settled there, but I don't love it.
I still push all of my blog posts to Tumblr, too, but almost no one I used to follow there is still active, and I mostly use it to see cool 40k art.
The internet doesn't have to be a dumpster fire, but it requires more intentional use nowadays to make it work for you.
Updated my blogroll to include a few social feeds (microblogs) that are as good as my favorite traditional blogs.
Some people use social in ways that work better for them than a blog, and they'll improve your feed on those platforms.
(Sadly, only Mastodon appears to offer an RSS feed.)
Weird side note re: #blogging in 2025 and #powRSS posts.
After years of milkshake ducks, blindly sharing blog posts from strangers feels more precarious than it used to, and unlike scanning a social feed, it's not always easy to identify a problematic individual based on their blog.
I always do a quick "About" review when I come across someone new to me before sharing their work, but it's not a foolproof process.
It never was, but it definitely feels different now.