A lot of blogging is reputation and consistency. The other part is audience. It looks like he's been at this for 3 years. There might just not be an audience for it. If that's the case, and the hustle doesn't bring you inherent joy, it probably isn't worth doing.
I'd probably add Lobste.rs to my rotation if I had an invite. But I'm not sure that I'll ever reach the regular blog follows that I used to have. I tried a few blog feed readers/aggregators following the death of Google Reader, but nothing really stuck. Not to mention the features that used to be in the browser being entirely gone at this point.
I also configured it to fetch Hacker News with some filters to get rid of AI related posts, and it's actually a good way to follow this also.
> And nothing makes me angrier than seeing people popping up from nowhere to express their sadness when a project gets shut down. Because where the fuck were these people when the creators of these projects needed some help to keep the momentum going?
See for example any local business, which had maybe half a dozen customers each day but got an outpouring of support once they announced they were closing down after a few decades. You could have actually helped them keep going, but no.
More morbidly though, this feels a lot like whatever happens when someone commits suicide. You get all these people coming out of nowhere to give their condolences and support and shock that they were going through this, but none of those people were ever actually around when the person needed them.
People have an unfortunate tendency to support things that are gone only after it's too late to do anything about it.
But yeah, it seems like actual interaction is a rarity online. Lots of lurkers watching from the shadows, but the rarity of actual comments or messages means that anyone that isn't a popular name in the space will probably not even know most of them exist.