August 7, 2026
Hot Links & Stranger Things
Building Community Out of Strangers
Blogroll fever: people are ditching the algorithm and betting on strangers
TLDR: A blogger expanded their public reading list to include online strangers, arguing that personal sites feel more human than endless outrage-driven news. In the comments, the big reaction was: nice idea, but why not make discovery a group effort so everyone can help surface new voices?
A blogger’s decision to stuff their public reading list with so-called “Internet strangers” has turned into a tiny indie-web soap opera about how people actually want to live online. The post itself is sweetly rebellious: less doomscrolling, less giant news machine, more real humans posting about lunch, books, cats, songs, and the weird little details of life. In plain English, it’s a rejection of big platforms and a vote for small personal sites where ordinary people ramble at their own pace.
And the reaction? Very "finally, someone said it." The loudest mood from the community is that discovery should be shared, messy, and human, not locked inside giant apps. Commenter 8by3 jumped in with a crowd-sourced twist, basically saying: why stop at one person’s reading list when a whole network can help people find new writers together? That turns the vibe from cozy personal curation into a mild ideological flex: is community built by one thoughtful person linking out, or by a group-made discovery machine?
There’s no full-on blood feud in the comments we’ve got, but there is delicious low-stakes tension between personal taste and collective discovery. The underlying hot take is that the old-fashioned blogroll might be having a scandalous comeback. The joke practically writes itself: after years of apps promising “connection,” the internet is now rediscovering… reading what random interesting people wrote on their websites. Revolutionary!
Key Points
- •The author expanded their blogroll to include people from their RSS feed reader, including many personal blogs by people they do not know offline.
- •The update was prompted by Frank Meeuwsen’s call for people to share their blogrolls and is tied to the author’s broader shift away from Google toward more direct person-to-person web use.
- •The article is the author’s contribution to the November 2023 IndieWeb Blog Carnival on the theme of community and belonging, organized by Alex Sirac.
- •The author says they have shifted their attention from publication-driven and event-focused news toward following individuals and reading about daily life on personal websites.
- •The article describes a practical method for deciding whom to follow, including reviewing a site’s recent posts, about page, reading habits, overlapping interests, and diversity of perspectives.