The next prompt for Blogging Futures is on Infrastructure.
I had a conversation with Tom yesterday, and one of the things we talked about was why more people don't have websites. The tooling around it is better than ever, so why aren't more people getting their own internet spaces?
One possibility is that the proilferation of choice has created a lack of clear information. Sure there are 10 different hosting platforms that are basically free, and you can pick from blog generators written under every language under the sun, but what do you actually use?
Another possibility: the ease of making a blog has eroded the narrative around blogs. It's easier than ever to do it, but less clear why you would even want to. Tom's small b blogging digs into this idea and puts forward a couple new reasons.
I don't think you can reduce the problem to either a social or technical elements. We need new paradigms in both ways to blog, and why's to blog.
Things like webmentions are technology that have explicitly social purposes. These tools can take some of the possibilities that exist in the internet megacities and help more equally distribute them, to small scale, small b, blogs.
Aside from webmentions I think there's room for new kinds of aggregation, things more locally controlled than reddit or hackernews.
A major reason I've been blogging so much (by my standards) lately, is that I enjoy tinkering with this site as much as I enjoy writing on it (if not more). A big part of the fun of blogging is hacking, at least for me. I'm definitley not suggesting that everyone needs to enjoy this, but talking about the technical sides of blogs is not only incredcibly fun, but it's empowering. It makes how we make blogs more accessible and personal.
This is kinda what I'm trying to accomplish with the personal websites learning adventure of mine. Talk to people about the process of putting together these neat internet spaces. I wouldn't go quite so far as to call that infrastructure, but its a start.