A blogroll is an algorithm with a human name attached to it.
It is usually just a list of websites, writers, feeds, or projects that one publisher reads or recommends. The IndieWeb page on blogrolls describes them plainly as lists of sites a person reads, follows, or recommends, and documents modern examples that are still being maintained.
That simplicity gives blogrolls a property modern recommendation systems often hide: visible authorship of the recommendation itself.
If I click a link because it appears on someone’s blogroll, I know who made that choice.
The bias is obvious because the person is obvious
A blogroll is not neutral.
It reflects one person’s interests, friendships, habits, professional circle, blind spots, and changing attention. Someone who reads mostly programming blogs will produce a very different map of the web from someone who follows experimental music or antique radios.
But the source of that bias is inspectable.
A reader can ask: Do I trust this person’s taste? Why might they recommend these sites? Are all the links from the same social circle? Has the list been updated recently?
That is a different relationship from a recommendation labeled merely For You.
A platform can recommend an excellent site without exposing why it was selected. A blogroll exposes at least one important piece of context immediately: this particular person thought the site was worth linking.
Maintenance is the weak point
The cost is upkeep.
People stop publishing. Domains die. A writer’s interests change. Lists become fossils.
The IndieWeb documentation itself includes both active and dead blogroll examples, which is useful evidence of the mechanism’s limitation. Human curation ages unless humans keep curating.
There is also no guarantee of breadth. One person’s list can be wonderfully specific while missing entire communities.
Yet that narrowness can be useful.
A strong blogroll is not trying to summarize the web. It is a trail left by a person through the parts of the web they actually value.
Some current blogrolls even publish OPML files so a reader can import many recommended feeds directly into an RSS reader. That turns the list from a static sidebar into a portable discovery path.
Dead Internet Theory often asks why the web feels less personal.
Part of the answer may be that discovery itself became less personal in the old sense of the word.
A blogroll does not say people like you also liked this.
It says something much more concrete:
I liked this. Maybe you will too.