Velouria blogs again!
---------------------

When I moved to Finland in the summer of 2017 and very quickly
become obsessed with cycling, I enjoyed reading quite a number
of regularly, or at least relatively regularly, updated blogs on
the subject.  I wasn't aware at the time, but I came in on kind of
the tail end of a bicycle blogging boom that started years earlier.
It didn't take all that long before many of the blogs I was reading
disappeared or faded away.  The "Retrogrouch" blog[1], for example,
has not been updated since October 2021.  The final post gave
no indication that the author was thinking of quitting - on the
contrary, it was celebrating the recent milestone of hitting
3 million visits.  There are a number of comments on that post
from 2022 from concerned readers asking if everything is okay.
They are all unanswered.  I also used to really enjoy "Pondero",
which at the end of 2018 migrated from Wordpress[2] to Blogspot[3]
and then (without actually saying as much) early in 2019 migrated
from Blogspot to Instagram, thereby fundamentally changing what it
was.  Pictures are still posted there often to this day, but for
one thing it's a tremendous pain in the ass to view them without
an account, and for another much worse thing, it's now just pretty
photos of bikes in nature with zero meaningful communication about
what he is thinking or feeling when riding them there, or the bikes
themselves are their accessories, which are the things I actually
enjoyed.  The spirit of the old blog is lost.

But the greatest loss of all was undoubtedly the "Lovely
Bicycle!" blog[4], published under the pseudonym Velouria, which
had been running since 2009.  The posts themselves were invariably
great, and chronicled years of all kinds of self discovery and
change during a wide-ranging exploration of many facets of cycling,
but Velouria also accrued a wide readership of knowledgeable but
opinionated cyclists and the comment sections were themselves also
often filled with very interesting and educational and sometimes
highly entertaining exchange amongst the regulars.

Velouria made her last substantial post in January of 2018.
It's now gone, but after a pause of what I'm sure was several
years, a new post was made consisting of nothing but a link to
a new website, pancogcycle.com.  But by the time I noticed this
apparent reappearance, that site had already gone offline and now
the domain has expired.  The earliest snapshot of it the Wayback
Machine took was in late 2021 and it's just a "Website Expired"
notice from something called Squarespace.  I don't know what, if
anything, was ever there.  There was an Instagram account associated
with that site, and it's still up, but, well, pain in the ass and
no actual information conveyed.

I often wondered what had become of her, while of course recognising
her right to disappear.  At one point in time, Google searches
involving "lovely bicycle" and "velouria" would autocomplete to
include the term "divorce", but if you actually did that search
(thereby, of course, reinforcing the autocomplete) there was never
even the faintest sniff of a rumour along those lines, so I don't
know why that ever started happening.  By this point I just kind of
figured that it would remain a mystery forever to those who didn't
know Velouria personally and that this was precisely the way she
wanted, and I fully acknowledged that neither I nor any of her
other former readers was entitled to anything more, and frankly
always felt kind of bad for attempting to find out.

One of my colleagues at work, about ten years younger than me, has
only very recently gotten interested in cycling and in cyclotouring
in particular, after her partner gifted her a very nice old Dawes
Galaxy touring bike.  They got back from their first muti-day tour
around the same time I got back from mine (yes, the write-up is
coming, fear not!), so we've been talking a lot lately about our
experiences and future plans and I've been sharing a lot of links
with her, introducing her, amongst other things, to the gospel of
Saint Sheldon[5].

The other day I opened up Lovely Bicycle to send her a link
and nearly fell out of my chair when I saw it had been updated!
Back in April of this year.  Once again, just like the now defunct
pancogcyclist.com, the new post[6] is actually a link to another
website, this time a new blog, "FrivOlt", evidently written by
Velouria under a new pseudonym of Ailbíona.  The new blog is,
uhh a design / fashion blog, I think?  I'm not perfectly sure yet.
The new Lovely Bicycle post links to the new blog's first article,
wherein she reveals to her new readers her former identity as a
popular cycling blogger:

The post doesn't talk about cycling at all.  What it's about, to
my utter astonishment, is the death of blogging at the hands of
Instagram and Youtube, and the transition from "blog author" to
"content creator" or "influencer".  It begins with the line:

> I can remember the exact moment I realised that blogging, in the
> form we had come to know it, was about to become extinct.

and she later explains that she's starting a new blog now, so many
years later, because:

> Put simply, the same gut feeling I had that told me it was the end
> of an era, is telling me now that we are ready for a new era to
> begin

and:

> Now that as a society we have collectively experienced the dark
> sides of ‘influencer culture,’ we are perhaps ready to see
> traditional written blogs in a different way: as very much optimal
> for sharing independent writing and imagery, without the authors
> themselves becoming consumable.

Now, look, none of these ideas, none of this sentiment, is in the
least little bit news to folks reading this now in Gopherspace
or Geminispace.  But it came as such a surreal shock to me to read
all this stuff articulated so well and so plainly and so openly by a
"non-technical" person for a "non-technical" audience.	It was like a
thunderbolt from the sky, it felt like a genuine collision of worlds.
I mean, okay, I would not ever have gone so far as to say that there
were zero "normal people" out there who mourned for the death of
the blogosphere, I just figured they were so rare that the odds of
me bumping into one by chance "in the wild" were effectively zero.
But not only did it happen, the post has multiple comments from old
Lovely Bicycle readers who ended up there via their RSS readers,
because they just never unsubscribed from the old blog.  I guess
I can't say for sure, but it's likely that at least some of those
commenting readers are themselves "normal people".  To think there
are still normal people using RSS in 2024!  I truly thought it had
somehow been totally erased from public consciousness.

I have read various excited, optimistic, uplifting things from
time to time in the past year or two about how, mostly thanks to
Musk's epic mishandling of the acquisition of Twitter, it's crystal
clear that we're at a turning point and that the age of centralised,
commercialised social media dominating the internet is coming to an
end and that there will be a renaissance of old ways or some kind
of Cambrian explosion of new ways, and isn't it so exciting???.
I have dismissed these ideas every single time, because I always
read them coming from hardcore techgeeks.  And hardcore techgeeks,
I'm now firmly convinced, have absolutely zero predictive insight
into the future directions of technological trends, because we
tend to be completely and utterly blind to the fact that we use
and perceive and think about and value or loathe technology in ways
and for reasons which are almost totally orthogonal to the ways and
reasons that the overwhelming majority of people who actually use
that technology do, and it's the use or non-use by that overwhelming
majority that comprises the network effects which ultimately decide,
more so than anything else, whether online technologies "succeed" or
"fail".  As far as I was aware, the overwhelming majority of people
are perfectly happy in Insta/TikTok/YouTube/Twitter/whatever-land,
and I was deeply sceptical that some jackass running Twitter into
the ground would cause anything more than lots of former users
fleeing to something more or less equivalent to Twitter and just
hoping the next jackass takes longer to run *it* into the ground
and does so a little more gently.

But maybe I'm wrong about that?  Could a small but real and visible
resurgence of blogging and RSS amongst non-techies actually happen?
I'd be thrilled if it did, but I'm not getting my hopes up.  I feel
entirely unable to judge just how likely this is, or, if it were to
happen, how large it might be.	I'm self aware enough to realise
that I am even worse than the average technogeek at taking the
perspective of normal people.  Every couple of months I read about
or am told about something which makes it clear to me just how deep
in the sand my head is, on so many fronts.  Apparently I live in a
world where people pay subscription fees to have genuine personal
relationships with individualised instances of LLMs, complete with
CGI avatars?  I just feel like I have absolutely no idea what
"most people" of any particular stripe are doing online these
days, or what, if anything, they would prefer to be doing instead.
Heck, I'm probably not even very good at taking the perspective of
mainstream technogeeks these days.  Maybe I'm not alone in this.
Maybe the ways people use the internet are just getting ever more
diverse and heterogeneous, ye olde unevenly distributed future.
That's hardly a bad thing, especially if it opens up space for
people who want to turn back the clock a bit to do so.	Whether
traditional blogging comes back or not, if the idea manages to
take some kind of hold, outside of tech circles, that users can and
should choose for themselves based on their own wants and needs which
"old" technology to abandon and which "new" technology to embrace,
rather than passively being swept along by fads and Silicon Valley
hype cycles and manufactured obsolescence, goodness, that'd be grand.

[1] https://bikeretrogrouch.blogspot.com
[2] https://pawndero.wordpress.com
[3] https://chris-pondero.blogspot.com
[4] https://lovelybike.blogspot.com/
[5] https://sheldonbrown.com
[6] https://www.frivolt.blog/home/we-know-that-feeling-of-floating