Blogs on F L O T I S S E R I E

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:38:06 -0500

It looks like Wordpress has produced a short-form blogging app that duplicates the model we are trying over here on the even-more-indie web. I might give it a spin.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:08:49 -0500

Amid renewed calls for the death of feminism, or of millennial feminism or whatever (TERF alert), I found this old victory lap from the era where it looked like new media had permanently paved the way for a newer, fresher publishing industry. It also tips the hat to Jezebel’s place in the fray, “the first online women’s publication to successfully combine feminist writing with a for-profit motive.”

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:36:00 -0500

I’m collecting mentions of the old blog while they still exist bc lot about this cohort is hagiography written well after the fact. I don’t think I saw it way back when, from the first time I “quit blogging” in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. As ever, a big part of social media is quitting social media.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:20:16 -0500

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.

Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.

I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:10:32 -0500

While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Liza Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much smaller bloggers. What we didn’t pay in money, we could offer in audience and attention, with mixed results. Several people who guest blogged found the audience and attention experience terrible – which began its own media cycle.

The reality is that having a platform on Al Gore’s unregulated internet means you face a lot of gross commentary from in and outside the proverbial house. Invitations for guest blogging were happily accepted, but the attention wasn’t reliably durable for writers and their goals. This reflection in Salon, “In Defense of Ladyblogging,” recaps what it’s like to have a massive platform on the open internet: “For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.” This is a limited telling, but there are some nuggets here that forecast the commentary around Lindy West’s book – particularly around the pressures of being smart in public while also being a person who wants to be liked and included.