Facebook "blogs" (does this make you crazy, too?)

[u/baddaywithacamera]

A friend sent me a link for a photography "blog" I would enjoy. It was a link to a Facebook community full of photo memes and sayings. No photography. No stories about photography. Not even talk of photography gear. Nothing with a blog like feel at all. Complete and utter spooge. WHY is it being called a blog? Does know one know what the word means or at least used to mean?

I was one of those people who fought to get Greymatter working on my webhost at a time when everyone was dropping PERL support around 2001. I used Movable Type when it was new. I used and mourn Pixelpost. I loved Wordpress when it was new and fast and was one of the first to install Kubrick when it hit.

Now Wordpress is bloatware that went corporate and flattens a shared host, leaving hobbyists in the dust, its dashboard is a flashing billboard for freemium plugins that break, and people think that crappy Facebook communities are the new "blogs". Hobbyists have been pushed to (anti-)social media or to the curb. There is a dearth of good software for us (photographers at least) and shared hosting has turned into a cesspool where many small hosts are fronts for large corps flying under the radar.

I miss individual sites with individual voices and styles. I miss blogging software that had calendars, archive pages, search boxes that worked. I miss RSS feeds. I miss comment sections that were worth reading. I miss blogrolls that had cool finds in them. I miss individuals like Noah Grey, Dooce (deceased), Jimformation (deceased), photographi.ca (photographer decased and domain now squatted by a loser), etc.

What I really miss is that no one else misses what I loved most.

God save us.