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2 hours ago
1
23 Sep, 2025
Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones. Their parents thought they were too young for cell phones and wanted to hold off on that aspect of reality, so they got an old phone from the 90s, and soon their friends also got phones. It formed schedules of calls they would make to talk to each other, even creating a phone ring of contacts.
I think I can confidently say that the majority of us aren't happy with the state of social media. Back in its early days it was fresh and exciting, a fun way to connect with your friends that might be far away, or make new friends online. It was cozy. No ads, no feeds, no endless videos. Instead it was just people, the whole reason you started in the first place. Now it's just noise and scary addicting and effective algorithms that keep you plugged in for hours on end. We build apps and products to help kill the monster, or perhaps we even delete some social media apps. Many of our friends we used to stay connected with seem so distant, as many of them too are tired and perhaps jumped off socials altogether. Well, what if I told you we could have the old web back?
In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds. This was how it was done for years before social media came into the scene. You would find someone's blog, subscribe to their RSS feed, and anytime a new post came out it would pop up in your feed and you could read it. One important clarification is that when we say "blog" it can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. On my personal website I generally write more of my serious blogs, but on my bear blog I plan to be a bit more casual. It will be a place where I record short thoughts, ideas, musings, or cool things I find on the internet. Just sharing what I would normally share with my friends. That's what made the web great, and that's what I want to bring back.
To do this, I am starting a bear blog that will have a dedicated feeds page that will have all the other blogs I'm subscribing to. The beauty is that you don't need a dedicated social network to make this work; just click on the links. Use whatever RSS reader you want! You don't have to use bear blog either, just use whatever blog you want. The key is connection. I want to point to who I follow so that you might follow them too, and hopefully create a page on your own. In some ways it's bringing back old web rings and simple networking through hyperlinks.
To kick it off, here's a few blogs I'm already subscribed to:
If you want to join but not sure how, check out the video I recorded below:
Best way to keep up with your feeds is to find yourself an RSS reader! There are a lot of options out there (although admittedly a bit old), so just find it on the platform that suits you best. Feeder.co has a pretty generous free plan, and if you're a dev there's hundreds of self hosted projects to choose from like Yarr. Personally rocking NetNewsWire for MacOS and iOS, and loving it so far!
I have no idea if this will amount to anything or if it's worthwhile, but I'm gonna give it a shot. The landline phones prove that we don't have to buy into the social media dopamine machine. We have autonomy, and we have the freedom to choose how we interact with each other. I want to believe we can resurrect the old web, together.
