The open web, they say, is dying, for numerous reasons, including the proliferation of “walled gardens”, search engine algorithms, the difficulties of monetization, and most recently, the advent of AI.
Independent blogs are surviving but I think their future is in the Fediverse, where they will sometimes be protected by registration and sign-ins. The good news is that such registration is unaligned with commerce or surveillance, so it’s not like signing up for Facebook or X. I should note that blogs on WordPress itself can now be federated.
I use a free open source federated CMS called Hubzilla, which interacts with most other fediverse sites such as Mastodon and Diaspora. Hubzilla’s advantage for me lies in its range of features and content types, meaning that it provides a simple solution for the various materials I like to host – from blog posts to photo galleries; wikis to bookmarks – all under comprehensive graded privacy controls. So, if you are interested, you may look for me there (see this blog’s About page).