Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.
(edit: it is now 23!)
Won't make me rich.
But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.
If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.
You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma.
They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?
Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.