Looking back in 2026, the internet before blogs existed was actually a very quiet place
Not that there was little content, but that few people could publish content. Back then, to have a place of your own online, you had to know how to write HTML, know how to use FTP to upload files to a server, and understand a little basic web-building knowledge. These things don’t look hard now, but in the 90s that threshold was enough to keep out the vast majority of ordinary people
So personal expression online back then was basically a geek’s privilege. You’d see personal homepages, pages built in every style imaginable, but the people behind them were all the type willing to spend time studying computer technology. For ordinary people, going online basically meant looking: reading the news on portal sites, reading other people’s content, with no place of their own to speak
That situation began to loosen in 1999
Blogger launched. What it did sounds very simple: it separated “writing content” from “putting content online”. You no longer had to manage a server, no longer had to write HTML; open a webpage, write, click publish, done. The page was generated automatically, the address came automatically
This change sounds like a technical detail, but its impact was fundamental: publishing, for the first time, required no threshold at all.
Previously, if you wanted to speak, you first had to learn how to build a place where you could speak. Now the two were split apart, and anyone with something to say could just say it
Then WordPress came along in 2003, with fuller features, self-deployment, and deep customization. On the Chinese-language internet, the word “博客” started circulating around 2002; Fang Xingdong and others were promoting it, and Sina started a blog channel. By 2005 and 2006, the Chinese blogosphere was already quite lively
Those few years really were lively. Han Han wrote there, Xu Jinglei wrote there, and a bunch of ordinary people whose names you don’t know also wrote there. No algorithm pushed content at you; if you wanted to meet people you relied on blogrolls — I put your URL in my sidebar, you leave a comment on mine, I go visit yours in return. Primitive, but effective, and those connections were real, not pairings generated by a system
This period had one quality that never appeared again: every person who blogged felt they were doing something a little bit important. Not because someone told them it was important, but because that feeling of “I have a place of my own on the internet” was itself new and precious. Before that, ordinary people had no place on the internet. Blogs gave them one
And that one thing alone was enough to make people take it seriously
The liveliest years for blogs were roughly between 2005 and 2008
Back then Sina Blogs was a very strange place. Celebrities wrote there, grassroots people wrote there too; the two groups shared a platform but actually didn’t pay much attention to each other. The celebrity side was traffic, the grassroots side was community, each with its own ecosystem
Among the celebrity blogs, Lao Xu’s click count passed a hundred million, and Han Han’s blog was where many people went to find an independent voice. These people brought in a huge number of ordinary users, making “blogging” spill out of the geek circle and become something everyone knew about
But what was really interesting was the grassroots side, the ordinary people
Back then there was a group of people whose writing maybe only a handful read, but who wrote extremely seriously. Someone serialized their technical notes there, someone wrote city observations, someone just recorded their own days. No pressure to monetize, no follower-growth targets, just writing. In the comments someone would respond seriously, then you’d go check their place, find that what they wrote isn’t bad either, add each other’s links, and gradually become regular online neighbors
That kind of relationship is hard to replicate now. Not because people changed, but because the platform’s logic changed. Back then there was no algorithm in the middle; you and your readers were direct, with no system matching or recommending for you. The people who found you were all people genuinely interested in what you wrote
Then in 2009, Weibo arrived
What Weibo did was actually a lot like what Blogger did back then: lower the threshold again. Blogs were already simple enough, but you still had to organize your language, write paragraphs, think of a title. Weibo said: no need, 140 characters, post it offhand
A large number of bloggers started migrating. Not that blogs were bad, but Weibo’s feedback was so much faster. Post a Weibo and within minutes there are reposts and comments. Write a blog post and you might wait several days before anyone comes to look. That difference in pace made a lot of people naturally shift over
Blogs didn’t die immediately, but they began to hollow out. Updates slowed, comments dwindled, and many bloggers’ last post is stuck in 2010 or 2011, opening with “haven’t updated in a while, been pretty busy lately,” and then never another word
The next few years were accelerating fragmentation. WeChat public accounts launched in 2012 and took away the people who wanted to write long-form. Zhihu took away the people who wanted Q&A. Various vertical platforms carved up everyone else by interest
Portal blogs shut down one after another. NetEase Blog closed in 2019, Sohu Blog is basically abandoned, and MSN Spaces is nowhere to be found. The things you wrote carefully in those years — those photos, those records, those words written to someone — vanished outright when the servers powered down. Not archived, not migrated, just gone
This is the ugliest side of how the blog era ended: the content wasn’t yours, the platform closed whenever it wanted, and you couldn’t take anything with you.
But one thing many people didn’t notice: even as these platforms switched off one by one, there was always a group of people blogging in a completely different way
They didn’t use Sina, didn’t use NetEase; they bought their own domain, set up their own server, maintained an independent site. The traffic might be only a few dozen people, but they wrote for five years, ten years, without ever stopping
These people were the seeds of the later independent blog revival
When portal blogs were at their liveliest, independent blogs already existed
An independent blog means: buy your own domain, deploy it yourself, maintain it yourself. No platform does anything for you, and no platform can make any decision for you. It’s a hassle, but the thing genuinely belongs to you
This group was a minority from the start. During the blog boom, most people chose Sina or NetEase, because it was simple and because there was traffic. The people who chose independent blogs never much cared about those things. What they cared about was something else: this place has to be mine, so that one day when the platform goes down I don’t lose everything
What happened later proved them right
After the portal blogs shut down one by one, these people’s blogs were still there. The domain was still the same domain, the content was still the same content; the earliest post might have been written in 2004 and you can still open it now. That kind of continuity is a rare thing on the Chinese internet
But saying independent blogs always had people doesn’t mean it was thriving
During that time, independent blogs were more like a water table: invisible on the surface, but never dried up. Not many people wrote them, they knew each other, and occasionally they’d run into each other in the comments and know the other was still updating — that counted as a kind of quiet companionship. The circle was small, but very stable
Among the people writing independent blogs, programmers made up a large share. The reason is simple: setting up an independent blog still has a threshold for ordinary people, but it’s nothing to a programmer. And we programmers have always had the habit of recording things — writing down the pitfalls we’ve hit, organizing what we’ve learned, convenient for ourselves to look up later and incidentally useful to others
This kind of blog has one characteristic: it doesn’t care much about whether it reads well, it cares about whether it’s clear. An article might just be solving a very specific technical problem, with a title that is simply the problem itself, no rhetoric at all. But these articles often have a long life, because search engines keep pushing them to people who hit the same problem. Some articles were written ten years ago and are still being cited today
Besides programmers, there’s also a group of writers. Not professional writers, just people who like to write. What they write varies wildly: someone writes city wandering, someone writes reading notes, someone writes about a period of their own experience, someone is just recording their days. No clear reader in mind, and when writing they don’t think much about reach; they just write
These two groups: one stayed because of utility, one stayed because of expression. But they have one thing in common: neither relies much on external feedback to decide whether to keep writing
This point is crucial. On today’s platforms like C$DN and Zhihu, feedback is instant, and it’s easy to adjust what and how you write based on the numbers. Independent blogs don’t have that mechanism, or rather you can choose to ignore it entirely. People who write long-term have essentially all found a motivation to write that’s independent of external feedback
Around 2020, a new concept started circulating in this circle: DigitalGarden, the digital garden
This concept is a bit different from a traditional blog. A traditional blog is arranged by time, newest on top, older ones slowly sinking, like a river with content flowing away in time. A digital garden doesn’t emphasize the timeline; it’s more like a growing system: you plant an idea in it, come back months later to add to it, modify it again a year later; it keeps changing, but it’s always there
This concept attracted a group of people, not entirely for publishing, but for organizing their own thinking. Treating the blog as a continuously growing knowledge base rather than a content publishing channel
These two uses, publishing and organizing, actually don’t conflict, and many people do both at once. But the emergence of the term digital garden marked one thing: independent blogs began to shift from “I want people to see me” to “I want to keep what I’ve thought about”
The motivation changed, and so did what people wrote
The real revival of independent blogs probably started around 2022 and 2023
It wasn’t triggered by one landmark event; several things happened at once, stacked together, pushing a group of people in this direction
First, platforms made people more and more exhausted
This isn’t about one specific platform; it’s that all content platforms in this big-data era are heading in the same direction. Recommendation mechanisms get stronger and stronger: what you see is less and less what you actively choose, and more what the system thinks you should see. The same goes for people posting content: what you write and how you write it slowly gets reverse-shaped by the data — write whatever gets traffic, craft the title however it takes to get people to click
Many people, as they write, find that what they’re writing is completely different from what they originally wanted to write. But they can’t stop, because stopping means traffic goes to zero, means all the accumulation so far is wiped out
The fact that platform accounts can vanish at any moment has also become intolerable for more and more people. Not necessarily a ban — maybe the platform itself is failing, or some feature is taken offline, or the rules change, and your content suddenly disappears, or reaches nobody. People who wrote on a platform for years have genuinely experienced that feeling: you thought you were building something, but you were just filling in content for someone else
Then AI content began appearing at scale
After 2023, the quality of content on the internet began to change visibly. Search a question, and the first few pages are all articles with similar structure, similar tone, but with absolutely no information in them when you read them. You know it’s AI-written pre-made food, because it’s too fluent, too complete, but not a single sentence was actually thought through
This had an effect on us: things written by real people suddenly became precious
Not that it’s precious only if it’s well written, but that as long as what you write contains real judgment, real experience, even real bias, it becomes fundamentally different from that AI-generated content. Readers can feel that difference — which is what I’ve often said before: AI’s pre-made food doesn’t have that breath of real life that a human’s writing does
Against this backdrop, something as “inefficient” as independent blogs began to seem valuable. A person willing to spend time setting up their own site and seriously writing an article with no trace of SEO optimization — that act itself says: this is a real person, seriously saying one thing
Another important change is that building a site got a lot simpler
Setting up an independent blog used to mean choosing a CMS, buying a server, configuring the environment, and solving problems yourself by reading docs. The WordPress stack is powerful, but it has maintenance costs and isn’t very secure. Many people who wanted to write were shut out by that threshold
Now it’s different. Static site generators have matured a lot: Hugo, Astro, Hexo… With these tools you write Markdown files locally, and a single bun run build generates the site. Deploy straight to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages, free, done in minutes, no server to manage. Go through the whole flow once and you can have a decent independent blog up in an afternoon
For people with a bit of technical background, the threshold is basically gone. For people with no technical background at all, there are also solutions like converting Notion straight into a blog, or Obsidian Publish, turning the note-taking app you already use into an accessible website
The maturity of the tools has drastically shortened the distance between wanting to build and being able to build.
At this point, the concept of the digital garden also resurfaced
Actually the concept isn’t new, but back then it circulated mostly in geek circles, out of reach for ordinary writers. In the past two years, with the revival of independent blogs, more people have come across this idea: treat your own site not as a publishing platform, but as a continuously growing knowledge base
The difference between a digital garden and a traditional blog lies at its core in the attitude toward the idea of “finished”
The logic of a traditional blog is that an article is only published when it’s finished, and once it’s out it’s final. The logic of a digital garden is that an idea can start as a seed, a few sentences, immature, but planted first. Come back after a while, add to it, revise it, maybe it eventually grows into a complete article, maybe it stays those few sentences, but it’s there, and you can come back and keep thinking any time
For many people this logic is a liberation. Because the assumption that “if you’re going to write, write it complete” actually stops a lot of people from picking up the pen. A digital garden lets you put incomplete things in, lets your thinking process be visible, lets your site stay permanently “under construction”
These two things, escaping the algorithm and lowering the barrier to building, stacked together, put independent blogs in a very interesting position in 2026
It isn’t mainstream, and it won’t become mainstream. But there are noticeably more people writing independent blogs than five years ago, and the reason has changed too: it’s not because there was no better choice, but a deliberate choice made after thinking it through
So back to our original question: what are the people writing independent blogs now actually doing
They can roughly be divided into a few categories
Not strict categories — many people belong to several at once — but roughly this is the outline
The first category is the record-keepers
They write down their life, their thoughts, their experiences. Not necessarily on any theme, not necessarily at a fixed frequency; they just write when they feel like it. From the outside such blogs may look casual, but they often last the longest. Because the motivation for writing is the simplest: not for readers, but to leave something for oneself
Many people in this category suddenly realize at some point that their memories are fading. Not that their memory is getting worse, but those scattered thoughts, that thing they figured out one day, the state they were in during some period — if they don’t write them down, three months later they themselves can’t remember ever having thought them. The blog becomes a way of fighting forgetting
The second category is the organizers
These people use the blog as a knowledge base. Whatever they learn, read, research, they organize and put it up there. The act of writing itself helps them think things through: you think you understand, but when you actually try to write it clearly, you often find several places that are still fuzzy
Among us programmers, there are many of this type. You hit a pitfall on a technical problem, and once you solve it you write a retrospective: first, to help yourself remember; second, in case someone hits the same problem and can search for it. These articles don’t pursue beauty, they pursue accuracy. Some articles are still being cited years after they were written, because the problem still exists and the solution still works
The third category is the thinkers
These people deal with things they haven’t figured out yet on their blog. They’re not sharing conclusions, they’re using writing to advance their thinking. When an article goes out it may still have many holes, but that’s fine: someone points them out in the comments, or they come back after a while, find where they got it wrong, and write a follow-up
This kind of blog has a particular texture when you read it, because you can feel the author genuinely thinking, rather than displaying a polished viewpoint. In today’s flood of AI content, that texture is very hard to fake
The fourth category is the connectors
These people write blogs partly because they want to find their own kind. Not to build big influence, just to know whether there’s anyone in the world who thinks about the same things they do
Independent blogs have a quality here that algorithmic platforms lack: they can be indexed by search engines, and over the long term. You write something very obscure today, and maybe three years later someone searches for it and finds that you two care about the same thing. That connection isn’t pushed by an algorithm; it’s a genuine finding
These categories mostly share one thing in common: they don’t care much about the numbers
Not that they never look, but they don’t use the numbers as the basis for whether or what to write. Some just turn off analytics entirely; some install it but barely look. It’s only when someone occasionally comments or emails that they learn someone out there has been reading
This state actually takes a bit of time to get used to. People who come over from platforms like Zhihu tend to go through a hard period at first: they write something, post it, and there’s no reaction at all; they don’t know if anyone’s reading, don’t know if it’s good, and there’s no external signal telling them whether to continue or stop
Many people give up at this stage
Those who make it through tend to have figured one thing out at some point: does writing this have value for me
If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter if nobody reads it, because the act of writing itself has already accomplished what it needed to. If the answer is no, then even if many people read it, the writing is hollow
This process of figuring it out is actually the most important thing an independent blog gives you: not traffic, not readers, but a chance to work out why you write at all
If you want to start
Having said all this, if you have even a slight urge to start a blog, let me just say some practical things
First figure one thing out: what do you plan to use it for
You don’t need to think in detail, but you need a rough idea. Is it to record your life, to organize what you learn, to write out the thoughts in your head that have nowhere to go, or just to have a place of your own and figure out what to write later
Once this question is clear, a lot of later decisions will naturally have answers
About tools
Building an independent blog today offers many choices, but there’s really no need to overthink it — it’s just a tool, whatever’s handy
If you have a bit of technical background, or don’t mind learning a little something new, Hexo or Astro are the more mainstream static site generators right now. (The site you’re reading right now is built with Astro.) Write Markdown locally, generate it, push it to GitHub, deploy with Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Free throughout; a domain costs you a few dozen yuan a year. The first time through the whole flow might take an afternoon, but once it’s done it basically needs no maintenance — just focus on writing
If you don’t want to touch code at all, Notion has third-party tools that convert pages straight into a blog, Obsidian has the Publish feature, and note-taking apps like Bear and Craft have similar options. Wherever you write, you can casually turn it into an accessible website
CMSes like WordPress still exist too, with full features, but they’re relatively heavy and you need to buy and maintain a server yourself
Themes and design don’t need to be figured out at build time. Get the thing running first — as long as you can write and publish. Many people’s blogs still use the default theme after several years
About domains
It’s worth spending a bit of time on. Not complicated, but ideally it’s one you’re willing to use long-term. A domain is, in a sense, your address on the internet; changing it is a bit of a hassle, so don’t just pick one to settle
.com is the hardest currency; you can also pick .me, .io, .xyz and so on — go with your own feeling. As long as you think it looks good, is easy to remember, and is affordable. A year costs anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred; the difference isn’t big, and it’s not true that expensive is necessarily better. It’s just a name
About what to write
What to write in the first article has troubled many people for a long time
Actually anything works. Even “this is my first blog post, I don’t know what I’ll write next” can absolutely be published. Nobody will pay much attention to the first article, including yourself; looking back a few years later you’ll find it a bit childish, but its meaning is to take this place from 0 to 1.
Don’t wait until “I’ve figured out what to write” to build it, because that day may never come. Build first, then start writing; as you write you’ll naturally find the feel
About nobody reading it
After you build the blog, there may be a long stretch with hardly any visitors. That’s normal — it’s not that you write badly, it’s that an independent blog simply isn’t a place where you quickly accumulate readers through organic traffic
Search engines will gradually index your content, but that takes time. You can put your blog address in your social media bio, mention it in passing occasionally when you post something; no need to promote deliberately, just let it be discovered on its own
When someone leaves a comment or emails you, reply seriously. Independent blogs don’t have many readers, but the quality is high, and they deserve serious treatment
About persistence
Don’t set yourself an update frequency. Plans like “post once a week” — most people can’t keep them up for a few months before giving up, then feel guilty for not sticking to the schedule, then want to write even less
Write when you feel like it, stop for a while when you don’t. That’s completely fine. Some blogs update only a few times a year but have been going for ten years, and looking back it’s a very complete thing. Some blogs are diligent at first, then stop after three months — that’s still three months’ worth, better than nothing
With blogging, there’s no failure; there’s only the choice between stopping and carrying on
One last thing
An independent blog won’t make you famous, and in all likelihood won’t bring you any material reward. It’s just a place, a plot of land of yours on the internet, where you write what you want to write and leave the traces you want to leave
But right now, that act itself has become a little precious
Not because blogging as a form is particularly special or niche, but because people willing to write seriously, not depend on algorithms, and not chase traffic are becoming fewer and fewer. That scarcity makes everyone still writing seem a little worth taking seriously
What you write will always drift to the hands of the person who should see it
It’s just that they might still be on their way
