The Ones Still Standing
A friend started a campaign—"We Love Blogs," they called it—asking everyone to share the personal websites they actually read. I went through my feed reader expecting to pull out a long list and ended up staring at how short it actually was. What happened to the blogs of ten years ago? Most turned themselves into commercial online magazines, chasing clicks with titillation and calculated attitude. Others became third-rate YouTube channels. Most just died quietly.
Going through what remains, I found ten that still do something for me. The criteria were loose but firm: personal voice, genuine updates, no magazine pretensions. Harder to fill than it sounds.
Nerdcore is one of the true originals—René’s geek culture sprawl, running longer than most people can remember. He has the gift of being simultaneously loved and despised, which is exactly the right energy for a blog this old. You can smell the cheap beer and the slightly singed soul in every post. I’ve been reading it every day for years and I’m not sure I could stop if I tried.
Jana’s Bekleidet has been running since the beginning too, and survived the great blog die-off mostly intact. She photographs herself on sunny islands and in white-sheeted rooms and down flowering alleyways, and everything is immaculate—but what keeps people reading is the glimpse of something darker underneath. She looks like she’d never cause trouble. People who know her know better.
I Heart Berlin, founded by Frank and Claudio back in 2007, looks from a distance like a hipster cliché and turns out, on closer inspection, to be exactly that—but in the best possible way. Berlin is a city that eats its own mythologies and keeps producing new ones, and this blog has been in the middle of that process since before half its current readers were old enough to drink in Kreuzberg. It documents, comments, analyzes—from inside the thing, not from a press box.
Marcel’s UARRR is probably one of the last personal blogs in Germany that still carries any real weight. He’s tried everything over the years—YouTube, Twitch, podcasting—and each pivot has cost him readers, but it’s bought him the freedom to keep reinventing himself on his own schedule. Design, technology, drawing, whatever’s occupying him that week. Never entirely serious, never not a little smug. Exactly why it works.
Male fashion blogs in Germany were always rare, and most of the men who tried their hand at one during the Lookbook.nu years either migrated to Instagram or found something more stable to do with their time. David Kurt Karl Roth and Carl Jakob Haupt at Dandy Diary are the exception—probably the only ones who turned their blog into a genuine platform, got into magazines and TV, and managed to do all of it without hollowing the thing out in the process. The attention seems to have made them sharper, not softer.
For nostalgia without apology, Von Gestern is the place. Old Bravo spreads, Nineties LEGO instruction booklets, advertising from an era when everything genuinely was better—if you’re the kind of person who finds this stuff unbearably moving, and I absolutely am, you could lose a full day in the archive and emerge red-eyed and completely convinced that something essential has been lost forever. It has.
Rudolf’s Urban Shit sits somewhere between blog and magazine, and at some point I stopped caring about the distinction. He has an instinct for what’s underground today and viral tomorrow—street art, graffiti, the kind of city culture that happens outside press releases. If you want to know what’s happening before it shows up in the weekend supplements, this is where you look.
Lost Levels came out of the wreckage of Superlevel, which was Germany’s best games webzine before it folded. A small group of dedicated writers trying to do real criticism—actual commentary, stories about games that exist outside the PR cycle of trailers and embargo reviews. Still finding its footing, but the ambition is right.
Nobody understands fashion blogging better than Masha Sedgwick. She has the look, obviously, but more importantly she has the discipline—and a sharpness that keeps her from being just another pretty feed. Her blog is the result of real work done consistently over a long time, which in this medium is rarer than it sounds. She got everything right.
And then there’s Ronny’s Kraftfuttermischwerk, which is the internet in its most honest form: everything funny, weird, or worth staring at for thirty seconds, dumped into a single container and stirred. Electronic mixtapes, polarizing takes on current events, cat gifs. No pretensions, no curation anxiety. This is what the feed should feel like, always.