When Everyone Had a Blog
There was a moment—2009 or thereabouts—when the German blogosphere felt genuinely alive in a way that’s hard to explain now. Not professional media with a web presence, not influencer content dressed up as personality. Just people writing because they wanted to, because they had something to say or show or confess, and the connections between blogs felt like an actual community with its own texture and its own small celebrities.
What I liked best was the discovery. Landing on something new and good that nobody had pointed you to yet, a blog with a handful of posts and no following, someone who clearly had an eye or a voice and hadn’t found their audience. The blogroll was how you navigated that world—a list of links in the sidebar that told you more about who someone was than any about page ever could.
Most of it is gone now. URLs returning nothing, domain squatters, blank CMS installations where something once lived. The internet’s version of driving past an apartment where you used to know someone. I miss it, probably more than is warranted, probably with more nostalgia than the actual posts deserve. But that’s what all good scenes feel like once they’re over.