Art F City surveys the wreckage of the former art blogosphere to see who's working, who quit, and who became a magazine.
The lists are useful. Similar surveys should now be done for the music blogosphere, the film blogosphere, the tech blogosphere, and the science fiction blogosphere.
The RSS list I'm always going on about (my personal feed list, not the list of readers) includes very little in the way of "art" stuff. It's more a collection of trustworthy sources for politics, finance, and science -- an alternative to something less trustworthy such as the New York Times front page.
In an earlier post, Art F City lamented the decline of self-published voices to (i) clickbait, pseudo-news sources heavily regurgitating press releases and (ii) various chat and messaging services.
Less a matter of decline, perhaps, than getting lost in the noise and having reader attention diverted elsewhere. My take on it:
In the '00s we had the "blogosphere" and there was a fair amount of mutual support among early adopters who were attempting something different than the "mainstream media." That support has fractured as authors have either joined social media platforms, with their readymade communities of friends and followers, or returned to the old path of building a brand by writing for better-promoted media outlets. I think of the blogger Digby, who is now writing regularly for Salon as "Heather Digby Parton."
Digby still has her own blog but obviously doesn't feel it's "enough." You could say this is a matter of economics but to me the point of blogosphere was (i) labors of love and/or (ii) people who were sick of the propaganda. It wasn't about making a living. It costs almost nothing to publish on the internet.