Chris Aldrich gives a thorough rundown and rationale behind his new /following page.
He has re-enabled the native Link Manager in WordPress (it was disabled in v3.5) and gone into detail about how he has used this and plugins to create the new page.
It’s well worth a look if you’re on WordPress and considering (re)adding a blogroll.
Taking the control of our connections and relationships back from social silos – where we control a single, canonical list – is growing in popularity and importance as those silos continue to lock us in ever further.
As Chris says: “there could be additional functionalities built on top of and even beside all of this” – especially from an #indieweb perspective.
I don’t think I’ll be using this method (as the link manager was previously removed there is always the potential for the underlying functionality to be stripped from WordPress core) but I will be implementing some form of explicit blogroll in addition to my webmention directory.