One theory I had was that blogrolls were common previously and allowed for cluster navigation. My friends and I certainly had these pointing to each other because why wouldn't you? The big bloggers on HN I see are tptacek, rachelbythebay, and simonwillison and none of them have a blogroll. General wisdom in website SEO etc. is to keep the user on your page and not send them elsewhere and I thought that perhaps many people were adhering to that. However, I think blogrolls were just not common ever and I was in a bubble that had them and so thought they were.

Here's what I did to find out. I first used an RSS aggregate feed that I recall: Planet Debian. I then picked out a ten year old archive of that feed but not on September 11 itself (well because you know). And the data says that blogrolls were always rare! So it's not that.

Blogroll:

https://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1576

No Blogroll:

http://blog.alteholz.eu/

http://damog.net/

https://henrich-on-debian.blogspot.com/

http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_o...

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/

https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/

https://grep.be/blog/

https://www.preining.info/blog/

http://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/

https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/Systemd_pitfalls.html

Indeterminate:

https://blog.sesse.net/blog (relaunched now, original excluded, can't be verified)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160227131501/https://enc.com.a... (not really, but he lists all other people he knows with his name, which I thought was cool)

Niches in the internet today still use webrings, you can still find them with a Google search and some navigation.