RE: To Blogroll, or to not?

I’m not officially participating in the replyjuly challenge because I didn’t really like the pressure of all these blog challenges (maybe more on that later) even though I often enjoy and follow them. But I do like the idea of responding to each other via our blogs. That’s one of the key concept of webmentions from the IndieWeb community that I like the most.

A set of blog posts caught my attention the past couple of days asking « To blogroll, or not to ». Not necessary the question by itself, I understand why you would ask yourself “should I have such a page or not”, but more about the reasons behind not having one.

Disclaimer: if you are not familiar with my site, I do have such a blogroll page, I wrote about it already, even though it was more about the creation process of such a page (and a v2 is comming, when I’ll have time to write a small script to automate the cleaning of my OPML export).

Most of the push back of a blogroll page seems to be the curation of what to include or not. Jedda wrote:

What I have a hard time with is curating my blogroll.

Or Brandon said:

• Blogs come and go and sometimes very quickly.
• Sometimes it can be tricky to endorse content when we don’t really know people.

Maybe it is my misunderstanding of what a blogroll is, but for me it isn’t a list of people / site I fully endorse and agree with every single post. They are blogs that caught my eyes at some point when simply browsing from sites to sites (thanks to blogroll, webrings, Fediverse, …). That doesn’t mean every single sites in that list is golden and have “my stamp”. It just means they are in my RSS reader. It doesn’t even mean I read all their post… It means that I read some of their post. And if I remove them from my reader, it is because I don’t read any of their post anymore, for whatever reason (maybe that main discussed topics they address doesn’t interest me anymore, or whatever). Nothing personal (well, it could happen, but I think it happened once in so many years)!

Wikipedia indicates that a blogroll is:

A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).

For me they are just that, a list of blogger (in my feed reader) that you could check out to find other people into blogging. Nothing more. No endorsement other than: “hey I read these people posts from time to time, and if you are looking for more to read, check them out, maybe you’ll like one or two”.

The same way that most webrings are not an endorsement of all websites in the ring, just a collection of people that wants others to be discovered.

Lazybear wrote something similar:

But, my blogroll isn’t really a recommandation of a particular blog. It’s a detailed version of the links parsed by RSS reader.

Lazybear concludes his post with:

To answer your initial question, To Blogroll, or to not? I may not, and I may rename the blogroll to /links.

Lazybear website now have a links page now that used to be the blogroll one. But to me it is just a naming convention and they mean the same… But again, I feel my blogroll definition is not aligned with others… And it is fine :).

I just added above my list this “warning”, just in case, to be clearer with the potential visitors of that page:

I do not endorse (nor read) every posts from all these readers, it is just what I have in my feed, and I read only the one that interest me.

What I found interesting is this alternative from Brandon about having a postroll page instead, where they curate specific articles they liked. Lazybear created one as well as Jedda. It is interesting because for me it creates even more work than a blogroll… Well, maybe not, because I consider my bookmarks page being more or less the same as a postroll. It may includes links that are not just blog post, but it is a list of pages I liked. I’ve actually read them and saved them for later in Linkding, my bookmarks manager. If I think they would interest others, then I click the “share” button while saving them. That isn’t much work since I’ve wrote a script that use Linkding APIs to retrieve those shared links when building my blog to create that bookmarks page (you can read more here).

Another interesting take was written by Veronique:

I also noticed that the same people always show up on these link pages. All the heavyweight champs of the blogging community are front and center. Like a giant circle jerk of semi-famous bloggers.

That is somehow true, and this is the reason I’m not filtering my list from my RSS reader. Doing so would mean I would probably select only the “best” (whatever that means…) with only very well written, long and documented posts. Meaning I would probably list mainly those “heavyweight champs”. I follow tiny bloggers that may not catch my attention each and every single post, but that’s the beauty of it. Sometimes I ignore or just scroll quickly on some post and not read them all, but they are still part of the global updates.

Even though I’m a paid customer of multiple news website, I don’t read every single articles there either… My free time per day doesn’t allow me to read everything, and even if it did, I would prefer doing something different than reading stuff I’m not interested in :).

One thing I can relate with is what Steve wrote:

I am now questioning my own blogroll. It’s such a chore to keep updated - not the method, but actually remembering to do it. I add and remove links in my RSS feed all the time.

That I agree… I wrote in my first post that it was a manual and annoying process. That’s why it hasn’t been updated since. But because I’m lazy nerd, I’m going to automate that (at least the transformation of my full opml export to keep only links within selected categories). The export process will probably still be manual though.

But here is the thing: I don’t care if my blogroll page is not up to date… The only reason I would care is if a blogger wrote something so obnoxious that I wanted to remove them right away. I’m not sure it is going to happen though, but that would be the only reason I would rush into updating this list. Otherwise, it will be done when it will be done.

I believe in not taking too seriously such things. This is my site and I do whatever I want with it. I don’t put myself under high pressure to update this list (or anything on this site) if I’m not in the mood for it. I do things as they please me, because that is also one of the goals of this blog: having fun.

Something I haven’t thought about though is the effect it could have on others. When reading Jeeda’s post, I was intrigue by the following:

I just don’t ever want to make anyone feel like Keenan did when they saw they weren’t included in one, even if it was (or may have been) unintentional. When I initially wanted to curate one, I obsess (as I always do) on how I would curate it.

So naturally, I clicked and read Keenan’s blog post (and discovered his blog):

As a part of this journey, I went to someone’s site, started poking around, and navigated to their blogroll only to make a tragic discovery: my blog wasn’t included on it.

[…]

The only reason this was notable, though, was because, not long ago, it had been there.[…] So I was left with the knowledge that it had been removed, with no understanding as to why.

All I knew was that it felt bad.

I admit I’ve never thought about this. I mean a blogroll is a list of blog I’m currently subscribing to. I don’t expect to be on other’s blogroll and if I drop from a list, I’m fine with that. I understand that we are all different and how it could impact other’s mind and feelings… And I want to be mindful of it. At the same time, this is just a list of blogs in my reader, that doesn’t mean I like every single person on it, and removing someone doesn’t mean I don’t like them anymore… This isn’t a page of “my friends website” either. I tried that in the early days of that blog, but I don’t know enough people in real life that have a blog to make such a list interesting anyway.

I write the same thing on my Fediverse profile:

I often add/remove people trying to keep a home timeline bearable, don’t take it personally :)

The important part being « don’t take it personally ». I wouldn’t. Don’t feel bad because an anonymous joe online has removed you from an arbitrary list.

As a final note, Keenan is also asking if he should have reached to the person that removed them from their blog roll. I’m going to say this: if anyone wants to contact me to ask such a question, or for anything related to this blog, feel free to do so. Be cordial and I swear I’ll be too, so do not fear writing a quick (or long) email to me.

Anyway, add or not a blogroll, it is your own decision :). But I found many of the links within my feed reader from such lists, so I’m not going to be sad if you have a few dead links or abandoned blogs in it! I’ll simply close that tab and move on the next one :).