Around twelve years ago, an online network I was part of dissolved. Although those who participated in them are mostly only in early middle age, talking about “blogging” — the maintenance, on Blogspot or WordPress, of your own named and curated personal site with your own journal-like posts — can make you sound like the Old Man of the Internet.

In the second half of the 2000s, I was lucky enough to be part of a particular circle of bloggers who gradually came to know each other “IRL” — or as the hub of that group would have put it, via William Gibson, in “meatspace.” It was a way of learning how to write in public, in a dialogue with a load of people much smarter than me, and I owe it almost everything, but it fell apart, as these things do, for reasons both technological and personal. The latter, the commonplace straining of intense but brief friendships, won’t detain us here, but the technological reasons are more interesting. Especially now, as we watch the blogs’ main successor, Twitter, fall to pieces in a rather more dramatic fashion.

The appeal of blogs, aside from their simplicity (you didn’t even need to know any code! At least, aside from a little bit in the early days if you wanted to post pictures) was a DIY appeal. Many bloggers were raised on the music press; some had made zines beforehand (and some still do) — and common to this was an idea of cultural accessibility, the writing equivalents of learning three chords, photocopying a sleeve, and printing up your own record — “it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it,” except this was easier still. There was a corporation in there, in the background — Blogger was acquired by Google in 2003 — but it was relatively easily ignored, compared with what came next. It’s important not to romanticize blogs (however nasty Twitter can be, it is only in my time blogging that I ever received a specific death threat). They were free work, and for many bloggers, its replacement with “real” books and “real” journalism and “real” academic jobs was highly welcome. Most of all, because Twitter and Facebook killed them off so comprehensively.