Looking for Blogs in 2025.
These days, it’s worth reading content from people and sites that aren’t owned by fascists or other billionaires.
When I switched RSS readers (to Miniflux) last year, I ported over most of my existing subscriptions and left it at that. But over the holidays I ran into RSS Club and decided to see what was there, added the whole lot and culled what wasn’t to my taste (or in tongues I cannot read). That set off a fetch-quest: I’ve been looking to add more personal sites (blogs) to my reader.
Sources.
To add feeds you have to find feeds. That’s no easy task in 2025, but there are a few sources to consider besides the RSS Club:
- Ye Olde Blogroll
- Alphabetical listing of blogs.
- Kagi Small Web
- A webapp that lets you sample random blog posts in an
iframe. (I’ve seen it compared to StumbleUpon of old, and it’s a good comparison.) - ooh.directory
- A directory with search and categories. It has a Random button that will show you three random entries per go.
- Feedle
- A feed search engine. Search terms not included, so you have to have an idea of what you’re looking for. It’s new, so hopefully they’ll add some non-search functionality.
- IndieWeb Webring
- An old-school webring of blogs and the like.
- indieblog.page
- A combination site that includes an “open random post” feature, a listing (sortable, searchable, and includes the last-post-date), and even a set of RSS feeds of random posts from random sites.
- The Forest
- Minimalist, showing a button that opens a link to a random blog or page in its collection.
- Bubbles
- A post-ranking site where more popular new posts from the set of blogs it uses get higher ranking. Attempts to surface the higher-quality posts of a large subset of recent blog posts.
Beyond these, there are OPML files that can list feeds. Sometimes people publish them. I may do so myself, once I feel like the churn has gone down and my lists are relatively stable.
The OPML wasteland.
The big issues with these lists are getting them, their staleness, and their relevancy. Finding them means looking for people who threw them on a git host or their website at some point. There isn’t a big directory of them. Some blogs may have their blogroll in this format, but I haven’t looked for or found those yet.
For relevancy, everyone’s tastes are different, so what blogs you follow is ultimately something that takes time to develop, and it’s less organic than who you follow on Mastodon, for example. On social media, you know you can follow, and you’re regularly seeing new potential follows. For feed reading, you have to be on a site, know it has a feed, and add that feed to your reader. Pulling in some list a random person made is going to be like letting a stranger pick your dinner. Some of the course might be to your taste, but you’ll be scraping the sauce off.
The staleness issue is something else entirely. I’ve only looked at two files so far (one had around 100 entries, the other more like 500; only a slight overlap between them). It’s fascinating to see the breakdown of domains gone versus broken sites versus operational-but-abandoned versus still-active.
My methods have evolved to going through one by one and only add it to my reader if it’s legit and worth it. The first batch (and for RSS Club) I simply dumped it all in the reader and used that as the sorting phase. But either way you go, there has to be a goats-and-sheep step.
The Obligatory Visited-Link CSS Snippet.
One thing that sites have moved away from is providing a a:visited color. I understand there are privacy concerns, and as such the styling options are limited. But it’s hard to remember which names and URLs you’ve checked across multiple lists and sites. So using the style add-on of your choice (examples: Firefox Add-ons: Stylish or Firefox Add-ons: Stylus), you might do something like: a:visited { color: #303; }, which sets the link color to a dark purple. Might use #FF0 (bright yellow) for a dark background.
This lets your browser tell you if you’ve seen the URL before, which helps cut down on repeating checks. For me it was hit-or-miss even with a visited-link-color, but that’s mainly that I hadn’t visited the front of every blog I’d already added, so it was a pleasant surprise when I tried to add it again. (Always nice to confirm your tastes have some consistency.)
Evaluating blogs.
The first thing is to judge a blog by its look. I know my theme probably turns some folks off, but mostof the blogs I’ve looked at have much better taste in styling. You get an overall feel for the space, even if you’ll often read their content in the reader itself.
That’s almost a passive, automatic response, where the first thing I actively look at is when their last post was written. Blogs that don’t make it obvious when things were written caused me friction here. Most are decent about it.
In the process of determining recency, I’ll also get an idea of the contents and frequency. If it’s over-commercial or over-focused on a brand or market niche, I move on quickly. Nothing against that, just not what I’m there for. But if I am still looking at this point, I want a wider shot of the content, so I look at the archives.
In frequency, I looked for at least a quarterly post. If a source posts too infrequently, it is hard to tell if it’s completely dormant or not. Even for those with six months without posts, I tend to be skeptical. But I do weigh those against their content quality.
Content quality is the least specific, but you get an idea pretty quickly if the posts are up your alley. The ultimate test is once it’s in the reader, but you can weed a lot before then by picking up certain clues that it will have too much content about some techniche I’m not in.
By that point, I’m either convinced or not. If it’s active and its quality seems decent and within my areas of taste, I plop it into the reader pot and let it do its thing. If not, back in the sea it goes, for someone else to catch and add to their gumbo.
The question now is where to stop. When is the feed list big enough, good enough? It’s getting there. I tentatively plan to do another batch of adds once I’ve got my feeds stable. At least some of the feeds I follow have blogrolls, so I will look for those at some point.
I’m sure at some point I’ll mostly neglect it and let things settle. Might remove a blog if it’s more noise than I want or into topics I don’t care about. Might add one more passively if someone links to one I didn’t know about. That kind of thing.
That’s what the old RSS world was all about. You’d see something cool and toss them in the mix, like social media but with a bit more personality to everything and a bit less urgency. When it’s on your own website (hopefully) you keep it a little neater, a little tighter, a little more thoughtful, versus it just being part of the firehose of a social media world.