I’ve been reading optimistic things like this on HN for long years now, but the world keeps moving in the opposite direction. Your post doesn’t confront the fact that the vast majority of people interested in your passions, stories, or art no longer follow third-party websites. Younger generations have grown up with the phone as default device, and they use it in a way that discourages discovery outside of social media or other for-profit apps.

In the early millennium, blogging was of course a niche interest, but one could still commonly meet people IRL who followed the same blogs; they were part of a real-life feeling of community. Blogs about local politics, religious denominations, or music-band fandom gained enough readers from those audiences to cause real-world consequences. When people are nostalgic about blogging, it’s also about blogging having been something that mattered societally.