Blogging Has An Image Problem

I've asked a few people recently about the differences between services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and traditional blogs. The answers are almost entirely conventional not technical, and this leads me to what I think is a big reason why blogging has receded in recent years: blogging has an image problem. It's supposed to be for everyone, but lots of people, who are sometimes extremely active on social media sites, are hesitant to start a blog.

From a technical standpoint, the combination of a blog (that supports WebMentions and/or ActivityPub) and a good Feed Reader can provide nearly all of the features people require from a modern social network (a combination that Pine.blog aims to provide). The technology exists, but to get started with blogging is still too complex. On Facebook or Twitter you can sign up and be posting in minutes, you can easily find other things to follow, and you can easily see what others are saying. Typical Feed Readers solve only one of these problems. You can follow other sites, but you can't post to your own, and you can't easily discover new sites to follow. Having a blog then means that you have to switch from reading a post in one app, to posting to your own blog in another, which makes blogging feel arcane and clunky. And even with both a good reader and a blog, it's still fairly difficult to find interesting things to follow.

Pine.blog is my attempt to solve all three of these issues at once and make reading blogs and blogging on your own site just as easy as browsing your timeline and posting to Twitter.