When you move away from platforms as homepage, you’re saddled with the (good) problem of having to actively find things to follow, when those muscles have atrophied from too much time stuck in the existential trough of artificial recommender systems.
The method that always worked for me back in the day, and that is working swimmingly again now is to 1) start with a couple blogs to follow that are interesting, and 2) when those link out to other interesting blogs (they always do, its inherent in the nature of blogging), you simply follow those. And on and on.
Here is one follow I recommend, though I admit not knowing too much about the author; I just know they write good things. Robin Sloan, for example, in their latest newsletter writes about one of the scourges of the web, the newsletter sign-up popup (institutionalized by Substack, btw, but epidemic across the web):
The newsletter pop-up treats website visitors as means only — a flow of interactions to be optimized, rather than a parade of individuals having real experiences in the world.
This plugs right into my feelings about not having stats or comments.
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