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Where to find blogs to follow?

When I started I had few RSS feeds to follow. I found hard to find them! Quand j’ai commencé, j’avais peu de flux RSS. I had trouble finding the sites. You had to look for the orange icon. The icon is also disappearing more and more. Having an RSS feed reader for 3 blogs and 2 news sites works, but it’s a shame; especially when you want to follow more people or more news sources!

Over time, I’ve accumulated various tools for finding these blogs. I can’t look at them all now, since there are so many in each field. I wish I’d had these tools at the very beginning to create my list. So I propose to share them, so that others can flourish.

The most effective tool is surely a site that lists as many blogs as possible. Aggregators list thousands of blogs, classified by domain, category or subject. For example, ooh.directory lists 2,301 blogs. On the other hand, Blogs.hn lists the blogs published on Hackernews.

Instead of searching through these lists of (registered) blogs, search engines can also be effective. DuckDuckGo and Google sucks, since they only link to large corporate or commercial sites. On the contrary, I came across (via RSS feeds) Marginalia. A specialized search engine for small websites. It’s perfect for finding blogs via searches. These other specialized (and often volunteer) search engines are emerging to fill Google’s void. Marginalia is the first one I found, then Wiby.me, which describes itself like this:

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

To a different extent, Clew has also taken the plunge. It focuses on writing by independent creators. No advertising supports the service. The search ranking is neutral. It integrates other variables such as invasive advertising or site tracking and the amount of bandwidth required to download pages.

Others are listed on the Wikipedia article “List of search engines”. I’m sure there are more I don’t know about.

Another way is to search directly for blog hosting platforms. Neocities springs to mind. It’s made for people who want to avoid technology, or just have enough to create HTML pages. They have a huge list of sites created on the platform. For the record, Neocities is a modern replacement of GeoCities, which was a way to quickly create websites from 2004 to 2009.

Another blogging platform I find awesome is bearblog.dev. It is small, efficient and focused on the text. “No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words.”. The platform has also a list of hosted blogs.

Some people ask directly on social networks. Everyone is happy to share their favorite blog or websites. Molly White asked for it and got answers.. Still on social networks, few tags can be followed. I think of #RSS, #blogging or #blog. Many people share their blogs such as “#blog” on Mastodon.

With this list now sufficient, other blogs can be found by simply sharing posts. Blogs recommend each other. Others explicitly share a list named blogroll. Over time, more and more sites are shared in RSS feeds. The hardest part is getting the first RSS feeds.

A blogroll project curated by people is also active since years: https://blogroll.org/.

Several times I’ve added a blog, and found its blogroll, in which two other blogs out of the six were of interest to me. From these two other blogs I found another blogroll, and then followed another blog there, and a blog post was talking. It’s a beautiful chain. I could have kept looking, but I stopped there. So you can find blogs by following other blogs.

Rather rare nowadays, each site can reference a “previous” and “next” site on a given theme. The “next” site then references the “next” site after it, and the previous site another previous site. Yes, this forms a list of next and previous sites. Once you’ve reached the last site in the list, you navigate back to the first site. It’s like a list whose sites you can browse from top to bottom or bottom to top, like a ring. Hence the name webrings. For example, bisray.com is listed in several at the same time. I’ve referenced several webrings so far in my bookmarks.

Blogrolls and webrings were commons in the 2000s, before the advent of Facebook and, above all, search engines. They still exists and remains.

So we have a nice list of tools to find blogs:

In the time of the Slop of 2025, sharing between humans has once again become paramount. I’ll end by sharing the blogs I find myself, following the fine tradition on the web https://shaarli.lyokolux.space/?searchterm=&searchtags=blog

Happy surfing, happy sharing and happy discoveries!

Humanely, Lyokolux