Every once in a while, there’s a major social media shuffle. We moved from Hyves to Facebook, then to Instagram. Twitter was a thing in 2011, again in 2016, and then it became X, and everyone bolted. People tried switching to BlueSky and Threads, but when Zuck started wearing big chains and got rid of censorship, the latter fell out of favor too (when he was suppressing stories at the behest of the U.S. government, that was apparently fine?). And now, people are starting a Substack. They had already been criticized for allowing extreme fringe figures on its platform, but we all know it’s just a matter of time before people collectively decide that Substack is problematic too, leading to yet another dramatic migration to the next, as-yet-untainted platform.

And yet, the solution has been right in front of us all along. You’re here now, and you probably even started here—on a blog. It still baffles me how cleverly the tech giants managed to pry us away from our own platforms, where we were in control, in exchange for a space to share content amid a global crowd of idiots and a sea of ads. “But how do I stay updated?” I hear you ask. I hereby demand the return of the MVP of the pre-social media era: the RSS reader. (I just installed Fluent Reader, but there are so many options out there.) Closely followed by the other MVP, the blogroll—a little list of friends and/or blogs you loved following and wanted to share with others.

As you can see at the top and bottom of this blog, I’ve revived my RSS feed. Or rather, this loyal friend had been here all along. We just stopped using it. And in the backend of my WordPress, there’s been a Links tab sitting there for years, where I used to collect links to fellow bloggers back in the day. (Not to be confused with the Links page, where I post links to recent blogs and my books for the #linkinbio on Instagram.) This tab—my blogroll—is about to get dusted off, too. Heck, I even reopened the comments. (Whether that turns out to be a huge mistake remains to be seen.) Not everything was better in the past, but the internet sure was—so let’s all try to go back to that.