Maybe it’s because of the holidays. Maybe it’s because we are focusing more on side projects. Maybe it’s because Facebook and Twitter are becoming the standard for communication. Maybe I just need to be better about finding new content. But the Diabetes group in my Feedly Reader feels abandoned.
The number of blogs without a recent update becomes too much to count with fingers and toes, and I can’t help but wonder what is happening to the diabetes online community?
The truth, of course, is that we are stronger than ever. Connections are forged, found, and maintained on a variety of platforms and we are accomplishing great things together. Seeing what happens online conversations moving offline is great, it’s one of the universal efforts of the members of the diabetes community I look to and up to. And I know it’s unrealistic to have every medium hosting diabetes conversation maintain its relevance over the years. I just wish there was more.
But as I said, maybe I just need to be better about finding new blogs. And better about commenting.
A Consequence of Hypoglycemia. 
My Feedly Reader is hopping with blogposts, but I follow a million blogs. There are definitely some blogs that have been quiet for a long time.
The online community continues to evolve and I think a lot of people change mediums. I used to participate in forums. Now I blog and hang out on Facebook and Twitter. Who knows what I will do next? Maybe I will abandon social media. You’re more than a generation younger than I am. Maybe when you are my age, there will be a cure. Or maybe there will be a diabetes community in some format that we can’t envision now.
But there will always be cats.
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Interesting observation, Chris.
I too, like Laddie, have more blogs in my feed than I can ever keep up on. But my dad also recently mentioned that he’s noticed things have slowed down recently. I think it might have a lot to do with changing mediums, like Laddie mentioned.
One of my favorite things about what we do is that any of our family here can go quiet for a long time, then come back when they feel the need, or the desire.
2014 has been a crazy busy year for me, and I’m hoping to carve out more time in 2015 to be more intentional about reading and commenting more, which always leads to also posting more. It’s often a fun, beautiful self-feeding system, IMO.
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It is interesting to watch the changing nature of communication and how we interact — definitely so, that many don’t write blog posts or even read them as was once the case. To me, being in the journalism world, it mirrors the struggles that newspapers have faced: people just don’t read a full story anymore; they read the first few graphs, if that. And so all the other detail gets buried and not read if you don’t get them to want or need to keep reading. Now, so many just turn to FB or scan headlines and Tweets to see what’s going on. There’s just so much more info out there. I, too, am nostalgic and miss the days of being able to read the smaller number of bloggers and get deeper insight into those worlds. But as you said, times do a change, and we need to adapt and evolve just the same.
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