When I moved to Finland in the summer of 2017 and very quickly become obsessed with cycling, I enjoyed reading quite a number of regularly, or at least relatively regularly, updated blogs on the subject. I wasn't aware at the time, but I came in on kind of the tail end of a bicycle blogging boom that started years earlier. It didn't take all that long before many of the blogs I was reading disappeared or faded away. The "Retrogrouch" blog, for example, has not been updated since October 2021. The final post gave no indication that the author was thinking of quitting - on the contrary, it was celebrating the recent milestone of hitting 3 million visits. There are a number of comments on that post from 2022 from concerned readers asking if everything is okay. They are all unanswered. I also used to really enjoy "Pondero", which at the end of 2018 migrated from Wordpress to Blogspot and then (without actually saying as much) early in 2019 migrated from Blogspot to Instagram, thereby fundamentally changing what it was. Pictures are still posted there often to this day, but for one thing it's a tremendous pain in the ass to view them without an account, and for another much worse thing, it's now just pretty photos of bikes in nature with zero meaningful communication about what he is thinking or feeling when riding them there, or the bikes themselves are their accessories, which are the things I actually enjoyed. The spirit of the old blog is lost.
But the greatest loss of all was undoubtedly the "Lovely Bicycle!" blog, published under the pseudonym Velouria, which had been running since 2009. The posts themselves were invariably great, and chronicled years of all kinds of self discovery and change during a wide-ranging exploration of many facets of cycling, but Velouria also accrued a wide readership of knowledgeable but opinionated cyclists and the comment sections were themselves also often filled with very interesting and educational and sometimes highly entertaining exchange amongst the regulars.
Velouria made her last substantial post in January of 2018. It's now gone, but after a pause of what I'm sure was several years, a new post was made consisting of nothing but a link to a new website, pancogcycle.com. But by the time I noticed this apparent reappearance, that site had already gone offline and now the domain has expired. The earliest snapshot of it the Wayback Machine took was in late 2021 and it's just a "Website Expired" notice from something called Squarespace. I don't know what, if anything, was ever there. There was an Instagram account associated with that site, and it's still up, but, well, pain in the ass and no actual information conveyed.
I often wondered what had become of her, while of course recognising her right to disappear. At one point in time, Google searches involving "lovely bicycle" and "velouria" would autocomplete to include the term "divorce", but if you actually did that search (thereby, of course, reinforcing the autocomplete) there was never even the faintest sniff of a rumour along those lines, so I don't know why that ever started happening. By this point I just kind of figured that it would remain a mystery forever to those who didn't know Velouria personally and that this was precisely the way she wanted, and I fully acknowledged that neither I nor any of her other former readers was entitled to anything more, and frankly always felt kind of bad for attempting to find out.
One of my colleagues at work, about ten years younger than me, has only very recently gotten interested in cycling and in cyclotouring in particular, after her partner gifted her a very nice old Dawes Galaxy touring bike. They got back from their first muti-day tour around the same time I got back from mine (yes, the write-up is coming, fear not!), so we've been talking a lot lately about our experiences and future plans and I've been sharing a lot of links with her, introducing her, amongst other things, to the gospel of Saint Sheldon:
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
The other day I opened up Lovely Bicycle to send her a link and nearly fell out of my chair when I saw it had been updated! Back in April of this year. Once again, just like the now defunct pancogcyclist.com, the new post is actually a link to another website, this time a new blog, "FrivOlt", evidently written by Velouria under a new pseudonym of Ailbíona. The new blog is, uhh a design / fashion blog, I think? I'm not perfectly sure yet. The new Lovely Bicycle post links to the new blog's first article, wherein she reveals to her new readers her former identity as a popular cycling blogger:
FrivOlt post "We Know That Feeling of Floating"
The post doesn't talk about cycling at all. What it's about, to my utter astonishment, is the death of blogging at the hands of Instagram and Youtube, and the transition from "blog author" to "content creator" or "influencer". It begins with the line:
I can remember the exact moment I realised that blogging, in the form we had come to know it, was about to become extinct.
and she later explains that she's starting a new blog now, so many years later, because:
Put simply, the same gut feeling I had that told me it was the end of an era, is telling me now that we are ready for a new era to begin
and:
Now that as a society we have collectively experienced the dark sides of ‘influencer culture,’ we are perhaps ready to see traditional written blogs in a different way: as very much optimal for sharing independent writing and imagery, without the authors themselves becoming consumable.
Now, look, none of these ideas, none of this sentiment, is in the least little bit news to folks reading this now in Gopherspace or Geminispace. But it came as such a surreal shock to me to read all this stuff articulated so well and so plainly and so openly by a "non-technical" person for a "non-technical" audience. It was like a thunderbolt from the sky, it felt like a genuine collision of worlds. I mean, okay, I would not ever have gone so far as to say that there were zero "normal people" out there who mourned for the death of the blogosphere, I just figured they were so rare that the odds of me bumping into one by chance "in the wild" were effectively zero. But not only did it happen, the post has multiple comments from old Lovely Bicycle readers who ended up there via their RSS readers, because they just never unsubscribed from the old blog. I guess I can't say for sure, but it's likely that at least some of those commenting readers are themselves "normal people". To think there are still normal people using RSS in 2024! I truly thought it had somehow been totally erased from public consciousness.
I have read various excited, optimistic, uplifting things from time to time in the past year or two about how, mostly thanks to Musk's epic mishandling of the acquisition of Twitter, it's crystal clear that we're at a turning point and that the age of centralised, commercialised social media dominating the internet is coming to an end and that there will be a renaissance of old ways or some kind of Cambrian explosion of new ways, and isn't it so exciting???. I have dismissed these ideas every single time, because I always read them coming from hardcore techgeeks. And hardcore techgeeks, I'm now firmly convinced, have absolutely zero predictive insight into the future directions of technological trends, because we tend to be completely and utterly blind to the fact that we use and perceive and think about and value or loathe technology in ways and for reasons which are almost totally orthogonal to the ways and reasons that the overwhelming majority of people who actually use that technology do, and it's the use or non-use by that overwhelming majority that comprises the network effects which ultimately decide, more so than anything else, whether online technologies "succeed" or "fail". As far as I was aware, the overwhelming majority of people are perfectly happy in Insta/TikTok/YouTube/Twitter/whatever-land, and I was deeply sceptical that some jackass running Twitter into the ground would cause anything more than lots of former users fleeing to something more or less equivalent to Twitter and just hoping the next jackass takes longer to run *it* into the ground and does so a little more gently.
But maybe I'm wrong about that? Could a small but real and visible resurgence of blogging and RSS amongst non-techies actually happen? I'd be thrilled if it did, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I feel entirely unable to judge just how likely this is, or, if it were to happen, how large it might be. I'm self aware enough to realise that I am even worse than the average technogeek at taking the perspective of normal people. Every couple of months I read about or am told about something which makes it clear to me just how deep in the sand my head is, on so many fronts. Apparently I live in a world where people pay subscription fees to have genuine personal relationships with individualised instances of LLMs, complete with CGI avatars? I just feel like I have absolutely no idea what "most people" of any particular stripe are doing online these days, or what, if anything, they would prefer to be doing instead. Heck, I'm probably not even very good at taking the perspective of mainstream technogeeks these days. Maybe I'm not alone in this. Maybe the ways people use the internet are just getting ever more diverse and heterogeneous, ye olde unevenly distributed future. That's hardly a bad thing, especially if it opens up space for people who want to turn back the clock a bit to do so. Whether traditional blogging comes back or not, if the idea manages to take some kind of hold, outside of tech circles, that users can and should choose for themselves based on their own wants and needs which "old" technology to abandon and which "new" technology to embrace, rather than passively being swept along by fads and Silicon Valley hype cycles and manufactured obsolescence, goodness, that'd be grand.