Small Web, Big Voice

Why to maintain a blog in 2025?

While the digital landscape continues to consolidate around many platforms, each promising reach and engagement and the holy grail of virality, some people still choose to write on their own little corner of the web. They update their domains, fiddle with their CSS, mess around with their static site generators, and publish posts that maybe no one will ever read, or maybe a hundred people will read, if they're lucky. It's not rational by modern metrics, and that's precisely what makes it beautiful.

I've been thinking about this lately while going through my blogroll (a practice of curating links to sites you actually want to read), and I'd like to mention three blogs from that list. They're not trying to reach big audiences or optimize for algorithms, but they've figured out something most of us forgot: our voice matters more when it's genuinely ours.

Kev Quirk writes at kevquirk.com with the kind of straightforwardness that feels radical in an age of hot takes and engagement bait. His posts about technology, privacy, the open web - and his collection of watches - don't try to manufacture urgency or controversy. He's just someone who clearly thinks deeply about digital autonomy and shares those thoughts without pretense. That authenticity is rare. Most tech writing either tries too hard to be authoritative or bends over backward to seem relatable. Kev just writes like himself.

Rachel Smith's site, rachsmith.com, captures something different but equally valuable. She writes about web development, creativity, and the messy reality of building things while also living a life. Her posts move between technical insights and personal observations with an ease that makes you realize how artificial the boundary between those things usually is. Rachel's writing reminds you that being genuine about what you know and what you're figuring out is actually more useful than performing omniscience.

Then there's Manuel Moreale at manuelmoreale.com, whose project interviewing other independent bloggers has become an incredible map of the small web. He asks simple questions and lets people answer in their own voices, creating this collection of perspectives that feels like the opposite of social media's tendency toward performance and positioning. Each interview is substantial, thoughtful, unhurried. There's no attempt to extract viral moments or quotable snippets. It's just people talking about why they write and what it means to them. In doing this, Manuel has created something that platform-based content rarely achieves: actual dialogue. Not debate, not dunking, not carefully curated personal branding, just humans sharing ideas.

These three people/blogs share something beyond their commitment to independent publishing. They've each found a rhythm that works for them, a way of thinking in public that feels sustainable because it's not performing sustainability. They're not writing about work-life balance while burning out. They're not preaching digital minimalism while chasing metrics. They're just writing when they have something to say, in the way that feels natural to them, on platforms they control.

Social media platforms have become hostile environments for genuine thought. Character limits and algorithmic feeds create perverse incentives toward provocation over substance. The entire structure pushes you toward constant performance, toward measuring your worth in likes and shares and follows... It's exhausting. Independent blogs offer the possibility of writing that isn't designed to manipulate attention spans or trigger engagement metrics. Just thoughts, properly developed, shared with whoever finds them.

Reading Kev, Rachel and Manuel reminds me why I maintain my own blog despite some rational arguments against it. Nobody's getting rich from independent blogging. The reach is limited. The technology requires ongoing maintenance. But there's value in having a space that's genuinely yours, where you can write without wondering how an algorithm will interpret your words or whether you're staying on-brand. There's freedom in knowing your archive won't disappear when a platform decides to pivot or shut down.

The small web persists not because it's winning any battle against platform dominance, but because some things are worth doing regardless of scale. These independent voices, scattered across their own domains, linked through blogrolls and RSS feeds and word of mouth, create a version of the internet that still feels human.