Making Personal Privacy Accessible

Finding and Following Blogs

This is the third and final post about blogging I am publishing this month as part of the Bring Back Blogging campaign. Be sure to check out the Bring Back Blogging homepage for more information about the campaign and links to other participating bloggers.

One of my favourite experiences when exploring the blogosphere is finding an interesting blog with a tremendous backlog of cool content. Finding these blogs is more difficult on the open web compared to finding profiles on centralized social media, but the reward of finding these highly unique pockets feels greater.

Finding Blogs

There are plenty of ways to find interesting blogs about almost any topic. The easiest place to start is with a simple query on a search engine. However, with a search engine, you are more likely to be inundated with irrelevant content and links to social media profiles.

Another way you can find blogs is on the different platforms that host them. For example, write.as has a blogroll of different posts by members at read.write.as, and bear blog has their own aggregator at bearblog.dev/discover.

There is also a fairly new website called Feedle. Feedle searches the blogosphere for content and blogs related to your search and provides you with RSS feeds for both the search term and the individual blogs. Feedle is a great way to find independent sites and blogs that cater to your particular interests.

Finally, there is a collection of over 400 blogs registered for the Bring Back Blogging campaign, and the entire directory is available on the project website. If you view the Bring Back Blogging directory on a computer, you can search and filter through it to find ones that might interest you.

Following Blogs

The best way to follow blogs is with an RSS reader application. Most blogs generate an RSS feed that you can add to an RSS reader application. When you add a blog's RSS feed to a reader application, you will be notified any time there is a new post on that blog.

There are a number of RSS reader applications to choose from. As with my recommendations for blogging platforms, I will try to recommend applications that follow more privacy-first and open policies and practices:

To follow a blog, you can copy and paste the URL of the blog into your RSS reader application and add it to your feed. You can try this out with my blog. If you copy https://koolaidwithkaran.com into your reader application, it should allow you to follow this blog. Once you add my blog, your reader application will notify you any time I publish a new post.



Establishing your place on the open internet can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Extricating your online identity from the silos of centralized social media brings many benefits, particularly when it comes to online mobility and freedom of expression. Armed with a simple RSS reader, you can then connect with others who have done the same, and begin a new journey of online exploration.