What Remains? My AuguStory

I discovered today that my blog post from yesterday didn't post automatically to my Mastodon account—which I assumed was due to an error made. But instead, I found out that [Robb Knight's](https://rknight.me/) [EchoFeed is shutting down](https://rknight.me/blog/shutting-down-echofeed/).

The reasons he lists for discontinuing the service make a lot of sense, but it still makes me sad. Not because of the service I'm losing, but because EchoFeed was one of the first IndieWeb projects I came across after joining omg.lol, and it has always worked effortlessly for me. There are many services that claim to have functionality to crosspost to Mastodon, but they only actually [integrate with mastodon.social specifically](https://ifttt.com/mastodon_social).

I am thankful Robb maintained this project for as long as he did, and he's been a great presence on the IndieWeb overall, and will continue to be.

This also was yet another reminder of the ephemeral nature of things—how much I take for granted even as I try to be so aware of how finite and fragile everything is.

## Why Do I Blog?

This finite fragility is a primary motivator for why I blog. Michael Hartley has written recently about [how he's making his blog more resilient](https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/08/05/how-i-make-my-blog-posts-more-resilient/) and musing about [what happens to our blogs after we die](https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/08/06/what-happens-to-our-blogs-when-we-die/). These too are not new topics for me, as I have posed the question of [how do we prepare for the long web](https://brennan.day/how-are-we-preparing-for-the-long-web/), and have had a [/death](https://brennan.day/death) page on my blog since I began it.

I want to leave a mark—maybe the way our ancestors did when they pressed their hands on cave walls with ochre and their blood. And I also want to do good with this absurd one-in-a-trillion existence I've been gifted. *How strange it is to be anything at all.*

I feel as though I've already written a lot about the origins of this blog already, and about how I've been interested in blogging for twenty years ever since Mr. Rehak, my fifth and sixth grade teacher, first introduced our class to Blogspot. How he’d try to engage our young, meagre class in political and philosophical discussions.

Despite this though, I can't help myself but to write another post to participate on Robert Birming's [AuguStory](https://robertbirming.com/augustory-story-blog/), where he asks bloggers to answer the questions "how you got into it, where it's taken you, why you're still at it."

I don't think there's an academic field called "blogging studies" but there are quite a few interesting papers and scholarly articles examining the hobby. It's been used as an [intervention for adoles