how many people are really going to read it directly

For me probably very few if any :) It does not help I moved to my site Gemini (the real gemini, not google's thing) a year or 2 ago. Not that I blog much anyway.

But I hope some future digital archeologist may find our blogs and get a view into what non-corporate controlled people thought :)

Note, I find Gemini and Gopher far easier to maintain then anything on the WEB. FWIW, I mirror my items on gopher.