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The Bear Blog question challenge, mapped

by Tim Severien

In January 2025, Ava started the Bear Blog Challenge, a challenge in which bloggers on Bear Blog answer a couple of questions about their blogs and related topics, and then invite someone else to do the same. This challenge, however, refused to be contained to a single platform.

I kept seeing friends publish their answers to often a modified version of Ava’s original questions and tagging others. When my friend Hidde got tagged, I started wondering: if I follow this chain, will I come across the blog posts I read before? Is it actually a chain, or is it a tree?

About 40 or 50 hours into an incredibly long ADHD-fueled passion project, I collected a comprehensive list of entries, and how they connect. It had me code, parse, clean up data, browse blogs, and pursue countless of blog post-shaped distractions. I had an absolute blast.

Behold, the static map of Bear Blog entries I refuse to make interactive because I have a backlog of other time sinks to attend.

Map of many domains that joined the Bear Blog Challenge chain and how they relate to other domains.

Chain? Tree? Graph? Graphs.

It turns out, humans don’t follow rules very well. This virtual game of tag was barely lived up to. You know when kids play games and make up rules as they go, sometimes to the point where the spirit of the game is lost? Well, that happened. But like a kid’s game, it’s harmless fun.

Had everyone followed the rules, getting tagged and tagging one other, we’d see a chain. When people tag one or more, we get a chain with branches — a tree. But then some people joined the challenge without getting tagged, creating new trees. Others didn’t want to pressure friends into writing and didn’t tag anyone, ending their chain. Finally, we have rebels who published a post despite not being tagged and without tagging anyone else. Anyway, everything together results in a pool of directed acyclic graphs, or put more simply: a beautiful mess.

In this web of 269 blogs, the longest chain is only 9 blog posts, where the last author either didn’t post a response, or refrained from tagging specific bloggers. Kev’s chain lasted 8 posts, Hedy’s and Ruben’s chains lasted 9.

While it’s common for people to tag two or three others, some people take the cake. Anthony tagged 8, Luke tagged 10, and Naz tagged 11.

Some are more pressured into this challenge than others. Jedda and Joel were tagged 3 times. 15 bloggers were tagged 2 times, but 5 authors didn’t cave under that pressure and have yet to publish a reply. Or not — that’s really up to them.

Most mentioned tools

In many entries, people link to libraries, frameworks, tools, and services. Perhaps we can learn what’s popular by counting these. For brevity, I cut off everything that wasn’t mentioned at least 5 times.

Here’s a list of technologies and services that power blogs. While Eleventy is barely mentioned in front-end and full-stack job openings, it’s a favourite amongst bloggers.

Those that write in an editor, mostly use Obsidian and iA Writer. Other tools didn’t make the ≥5 occurrence cut.

Some bloggers attempt to fund their hobby through donations via Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee. Ko-fi is slightly more popular.

All the blogs

I’ll end this post with a list of all blogs that people linked to. There are some gems in there, so make sure to check them out. Some entries have been deleted, and some blogs have gone offline. Such is life.

If you want to read most or all entries and (understandably) can’t be arsed to open each link, I’ve compiled a minimal RSS feed with all entries.