A Renaissance of Blogging

Lately, an old yet familiar word keeps popping up across my social networks: blog.

Stefanie Sun apparently has her own independent blog. Some WeChat public account writers are saying they want to reboot their blogs. Someone built a site collecting independent blogs. A blog dormant for years suddenly published new posts. A wave of platforms for quickly building blog sites has emerged...

What Even Is a Blog?

Many younger internet users probably have no idea what a blog is. By the time they came online, blogs and forums had already vanished from the Chinese internet. As someone who's not exactly young but not ancient either, I only caught the faintest afterglow of that internet era that old-timers so fondly reminisce about.

So what is a blog? In today's internet, it actually has a mainstream successor: the Vlog. If you know what "Vlog" stands for — Video Blog — then the word "Blog" shouldn't feel unfamiliar. A blog is essentially a text-based Vlog; a Vlog is a video-based blog.

There's another modern product that's closely tied to the blog concept: Weibo (the Chinese microblogging platform). In its early days, "weibo" wasn't synonymous with Sina Weibo — it was short for "micro-blog." Back then, there wasn't just Sina Weibo; there was also Tencent Weibo.

So a blog is really just a form of recording — a log.

Perhaps due to user habits, or perhaps for other uncontrollable reasons, blogs and forums never completely disappeared abroad. New blogging platforms like Medium and Substack even pop up regularly. Many companies and products still use blogs for update announcements.

In the Chinese-speaking world, similar products briefly appeared — like Jianshu (a writing platform) and Zhihu Columns. But after a flash of promise, they were left with marketing fluff and clickbait headlines. The closest thing to blogs might be WeChat public accounts, but they lack the open spirit of blogging, and it's nearly impossible to find the rare thoughtful article among the daily barrage of "BREAKING NEWS."

Platforms like Zhihu and WeChat, designed to be everything to everyone, aren't naturally friendly to long-form text. When you open these apps, your expectation isn't to read a multi-thousand-word essay. Among all the fresh memes and buzzing group chats, few can resist those temptations to sit down with a lengthy article. Content that requires focus deserves a focused platform.

Independent Blogs, Twinkling in the Night Sky

Due to the era's unique circumstances and differences in technology and habits, blogs have a very special variant: the independent blog. There are no independent Vlogs, no independent microblogs — only independent blogs. Podcasts, which have also been reviving in recent years, share some DNA with independent blogs, but that's another topic.

What is an independent blog? Imagine wanting to start making Vlogs. Your first step would be to register an account on Bilibili, TikTok, or YouTube, upload your content, wait for platform review, then share it with friends. Microblogs work similarly, and regular blogs follow the same pattern.

But independent blogs are different. As the name "independent" suggests, nearly everything is self-owned: your own domain, your own server, your own database. In short, it depends on no platform — it's an independent entity on the internet, existing at the same level as platforms themselves. Type https://weibo.com in your browser and you reach the Weibo platform; type https://subnooc.com and you reach my independent blog.

Because it's independent, you have unlimited freedom — everything is under your control. You can publish anything at any time, modify any content, even delete everything. As long as the content doesn't break the law, it's entirely in your hands.

But freedom comes at a cost. Every step of building an independent blog requires technical knowledge — purchasing and configuring domains, basic server operation. This is why independent blogs remained exclusive to the blog era. Beyond the need for platforms to aggregate users, the technical barrier was another reason we never saw independent Vlogs or microblogs flourish.

Precisely because of this barrier, there's still a community of tech enthusiasts who tirelessly tinker with this traditional craft. But most are just tinkering with the blog site itself — learning technology through the process, or using it as a resume booster. By the time the domain expires, the entire blog contains just two posts from the first week.

There's another form of independent blog: the once-legendary WordPress. Platforms like this made building an independent blog incredibly simple, solving many technical hurdles — at the cost of money. But this means not only writing content but also paying for maintenance, which is hard to justify for a blog with virtually no traffic.

These limitations turned independent blogs into disposable toys. You set one up out of curiosity, then abandon it when the motivation to update fades.

Those Who Still Blog

Despite all this, some people continue to update their blogs. Most are in the tech world — sharing programming knowledge, reviewing the latest gadgets, discussing how to build a blog from scratch. But non-technical blogs have become rare. The few that exist go unnoticed without platform exposure, hidden deep in the internet's wilderness.

Not long ago, a wave of "AI Stefanie Sun" videos went viral, and she responded on her own blog. Many were surprised that Stefanie Sun even had a blog — though she updates it only once every few years, it's better than nothing.

Going a bit further back — this one's sad. A senior colleague, known online as "CoolShell" (左耳朵耗子), passed away from a heart attack at just 47. Countless people mourned him online, and what was mentioned most was his consistently updated blog, which had influenced an entire generation. Though I had no personal connection and had barely read his blog, I sometimes wonder: when I leave this world, what will I leave behind for people to remember?

While writing this post, I searched "independent blog" and stumbled into one where the author was considering shutting it down. He listed all the drawbacks: it's basically talking to yourself, bloggers obsess over everything except content, nobody reads long articles anymore. He was thinking about closing up shop. Clicking through his post list, I saw he'd been updating in the past two months. I'm glad he didn't give up.

In that supposedly-about-to-be-abandoned blog, one of his articles gave me a glimpse of the old internet I hadn't seen in ages. Those comments — hundreds or thousands of words long, thoughtfully structured — felt like the early days of the internet, when people approached strangers with genuine enthusiasm and patience.

Maybe these people who keep blogging have been there all along — isolated islands that you might glance at from afar as you sail past on your way somewhere else.

I think I, too, want an island like that.

What I Write About When I Write a Blog

Before starting this blog, I'd already written a few pieces on my WeChat public account. More than one person suggested I improve the formatting, add more images, and use fewer words. Obviously, I didn't take any of that advice. Not because it was bad advice, but because it depends on why I'm doing this.

If my goal were to reach as many people as possible, I'd naturally cater to popular preferences — beautiful formatting, plenty of images, famous quotes. But that's not my goal. I just want to organize my thoughts through writing, practice my writing skills, and maybe share online to see if I can find some kindred spirits.

Simply put, it's the difference between writing for others versus writing for yourself. If I wanted to make money from this, I'd identify a target audience, cater to their preferences, and create custom content. But making money through writing is extremely difficult nowadays, and I don't have the ability for it, so I might as well write for myself. If these writings happen to connect me with others and earn some recognition — wonderful. If not — that's fine too.

What I want is a little garden of my own, where I can do what I please. If friends drop by occasionally, I'm content.

Maybe this mindset is too individualistic, and this era has no use for such individualism. We're all trained beings who prefer living within systems. But as my bio says — "Escaping from Shawshank" — I want to see if I can break free.

Maybe We're Moving Too Fast

The world changes fast — so fast that many people haven't had time to react before the next wave of change hits. Countless incidents of online violence and social news tell us we may not be ready for the information explosion.

Blogging is just right — it requires a small barrier to entry, its reach isn't too strong, and perhaps these are the reasons writing a blog feels more grounded, less frenetic than other formats. Is endless traffic and effortless distribution really what we need, or is it just a desire we want to conquer — one that simultaneously wants to conquer us?

Maybe it's the romanticizing effect of memory, or dissatisfaction with the present, that makes blogging a distant spiritual refuge. Perhaps once we look past the beauty that distance creates, we'll find the reality unremarkable. But — why not give it a try?

Learn More

• The independent blog collection site mentioned above: Firewood
• Stefanie Sun's blog
• The senior colleague's blog archive: CoolShell
• The blog whose author considered shutting it down: Rercel