Matthew Brunelle's Blog
I spent money on a domain so I might as well use it.

I Don't Want to Play the SEO Game

I miss the blogosphere and I'd been thinking about it a lot lately. Thankfully a lot of other people that are smarter than me are thinking about it as well.

This blog is mostly a writing exercise for me.
However I hope that what I write is also useful for others.
If the content is useful, then I want the right people to be able to find it.
I don't want to spam links to my blog.

I remember back in the aughts being excited about generating a sitemap for the first time. It felt like all I had to do was hand it off to Google's Webmaster Tools, as it was called then, and people could see what I wrote. Now I go to the Google Search Console:

Crawled - currently not indexed

No pages are indexed. You are directed to documentation telling you to play the SEO game. I decided to try out Bing Webmaster Tools because why not:

"Your site lacks inbound links from high-quality domains."

I get it, there's so much AI slop to fight now a days that its hard to sift through and know what is the good human written content. However I feel like with all these defenses in place we still don't see the good human written content.

Some Things Work At Least

I usually use Kagi for search, so I thought "is there a webmaster tool for Kagi?" The answer is no and I love that. Thankfully Kagi doesn't want to leave bloggers hanging. They are a big fan of the small web and all I had to do was open a PR. [^ You can't just add your own site though. Theres a minimum of three new sites, so try to add your friends as well!] Likewise, way back in the day I added my site to Personalsit.es. The PR tells me that was 6 years ago.

The problem with all of these approach though is how you have to (1) know that they exist and (2) take action to opt into them.

In an ideal world it would be nice if all I had to do was:

  • Write a reasonable title. Hopefully a meaningful one rather than a clickbait title.
  • Add a useful, short text description for the meta field.
  • Focus on 100% human written long form content, grammar mistakes and all.
    [^ and some form of lightweight analytics. I don't need targeted advertising, I'm not trying to earn revenue, and I have nothing to sell. I do however want to know if certain articles are being read beacuse thats a sign they were of some use. Umami hosted in the EU has been pretty good so far.]

Then I'd want something magic to happen: somehow all our blogs link arms and talk to each other. I suppose thats just a dream...

We Can Do Better Though

Anyways, I've mentioned that I am patiently awaiting for the ActivityPub integration in Ghost 6.0 to release. Yesterday I was looking at their dev blog post that pointed me towards an episode of the Dot Social Podcast. I hadn't listened to the podcast before but the specific episode had the leads of Ghost and WordPress chatting about the history of blogging, their future hopes. Some of it really hit home for me:

(GenAI note: these quotes are pulled from the YouTube transcript. I assume they were auto-generated with TTS. I've also clean them up a little, because they were generated after all.)

Why blogging felt different from social media:

Facebook was already around at the time, but it was for people whom you knew, and Blogs were for people who you didn't yet know, but who you shared something in common with. And Twitter kind of lowered the barrier to entry for that, lowered the barrier to entry for how much content you need to make and take off.

What they all benefited from was that it was easy to get started. It was free typically and it had this network built in where the social aspects that used to be in the blogosphere were like on steroids. You know, now you had likes and replies and two-way Interactions and notifications. It was a step above RSS in every way, in a way that allowed communities to form around topics. So for those of us on WordPress, on Ghost, on our own websites, that kept publishing outside of those networks, the web started to become more and more lonely. You would hit publish, and then the comments wouldn’t really roll in anymore the way they used to.

The discoverability problem I'm feeling:

From an SEO point of view, if someone's searching for, you know, content about Tesla, articles about Tesla, the chances of you ever even seeing that link in Google search results are now increasingly lower because you've got these AI summaries up at the top of the Google search results. Right, so there are increasingly fewer and fewer ways for people to discover this writing, you know, out on these other platforms.

How writers supported other writers:

Just everyone has relied on Google or social media apps, and there are so many other ways for discovery to happen. One of the things you mentioned was the concept of a blogosphere where people were linking to other people, right? And you know, I talked about this with Molly White at South by Southwest recently... I asked her, "How did you get discovered as a new writer? How did you get discovered?" Her answer was that her other writers, her heroes, respected her writing and linked to her writing from their blogs.

Finally their vision for what the future can be like:

It's time to revisit this blogosphere concept, but do it with a new web standard that makes it not just something that would work Ghost to Ghost, but something that works Ghost to WordPress, Ghost to Threads, Ghost to Flipboards, and have everything combined with each other.

This dovetails nicely into a book by Cory Doctorow I've just finished up reading, The Internet Con:How to Seize the Means of Computation. [^ You can, amazingly get a DRM free epub through Verso Books.] I'm not going to pull direct quotes from the book because I think it's worth the read. Many of the topics Cory hits on though mirror what ActivityPub support in writing platforms like Ghost, WordPress, and WriteFreely are trying to achieve:

  • Ideally automatic: you just choose to federate and off you go.
  • Interoperability: no one platform controls all the users and content. You can move when you want to. You can even self-host it yourself!
  • Network effects: it's not necessary for each platform to build their own user base, all platforms that federate get an audience immediately.
  • Niche communities: You can build smaller, more focused communities that can moderate with a contextual understanding of the community.

There's going to be lots of growing pains, but I think it's an exciting time to see how this all shakes out. Just today the Ghost GitHub tagged the v6.0.0-alpha.1 release! [^ Though the ActivityPub code lives in its own repo and I'm not sure its integration will release on a different timeline.]

I'm Not Totally Without Fear

Most of what I have talked about so far is the technical perspective on this view.

I have a fear though: I don't use social media because of its capacity to ensorcell you. Over the last decade I've made explicit choices not to use social media. In the last couple years I've worked on consuming more long form textual content rather than short form content. More recently I've been trying to get back into writing again. Reading and writing are skill, things you can practice and develop through craft.

ActivityPub will allow authors to openly interact with readerships again, but it does that by layering follows, likes, shares, etc on top. It is not bringing back the way things used to be. In the internet of today interactions have been replaced with engagement. So I do have the fear that we may head off with the best of intentions, but end up with the same problems from modern social media that I'm trying to avoid.

I'm still hopeful though.