For the past few years I've been using Twitter to keep people up to date about what's going on, and it's disappointing. I'm sure it's great for some use cases, people I follow are constantly posting wins, but it's not working for me.
Throughout my life I've mostly self-hosted my 'content' and usually gotten a fair amount of traffic and engagement from loyal followers. I never thought in those marketing terms, I just thought about hosting my own stuff so I have full control and sharing it with my friends. Talking about 'passion' and 'hobbies' and ideals of freedom using a natural/free flowing/stream of consciousness writing style without much editing feels like a joke when I consider it through the perspective of 'people in the industry' today.
My loyal following and traffic have completely disappeared, and my reach on platforms like Twitter feels inversely proportional to the depth of the content I share. Going deep is what I do. I don't need many friends, but lacking any Agape love is a pretty miserable existence, it turns out. I guess most people react to the void by conforming to what the platforms promote; no judgement.
I'm still here, doing what I do. If you look at my social media presence you might conclude that I've gone crazy or similar. Lacking the ability to cope with isolation, which for me is building tech projects, it may be possible I've gone crazy for periods. I'm not sure why building tech is such a self-soothing activity, though there are plenty of possible explanations I've explored over the years.
I'm recovering from my "Big Tech" social media hangover, in a sense. We were promised open access via RSS and XMPP and had the rugs pulled when our entire networks had entered their walled gardens. Now that pay to play is becoming the norm, the economics of self-hosting are starting to make sense. There may be a void of some technicals like a polished feed reader that IQ 85+ people can use, but if the economics of the backend hit parity with Big Tech/Ad-tech then a frontend will surely emerge.
Anyway, here I am. Trying to write a LiveJournal on the platform that makes the most sense. PhpBB, WordPress, Django/Wagtail CMS, all manner of Markdown-backed Static Site Generators; you name it, the common denominator is they expose RSS/Atom feeds so that's what a Reader app should focus on. The backend will heavily depend on the publisher and how they need to compose their 'content...' I've sampled the backend far and wide and continue to do so.
Feel free to 'Ask HarlanJI' if you have questions about what I've looked at.