A grinning toddler is bundled in a creamy quilted blanket and bear-eared hat. Next to him, an iPhone atop a wicker basket displays a Winnie-the-Pooh audiobook. The caption accompanying the Instagram shot explains, "i am quite excited to have partnered with @audible_com.... i'm not sure who loves it more, this little bear or his mama!?"

More than 260,000 people follow Amanda Watters, a stay-at-home mom in Kansas City, Missouri, who describes herself on Instagram as "making a home for five, living in the rhythm of the seasons." Her feed is filled with pretty objects like cooling pies and evergreen sprigs tucked into apothecary vases, with hardly any chaos in sight.

This is the "mommy Internet" now. It's beautiful. It's aspirational. It's also miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us - and miles from what the mommy Internet looked like a decade ago.

When Heather Armstrong launched Dooce.com in 2001, the emerging mommy Internet was dominated by blogs, and those blogs were raw and authentic. Some writers focused on parenting, but many used a wider lens to chronicle the ups and downs of their lives. Armstrong wrote about her depression, her time in a psychiatric hospital, her divorce and her experiences growing up in the Mormon Church. In a 2008 post about getting her daughter to stop eating treats, she sarcastically described herself as a "monster." "This is about teaching her to eat when she's hungry and stopping when she's full," she wrote. "This is also very much about making her suffer."

Armstrong quickly found an audience. In her heyday, around 2009, she averaged 4 million page views a month, appeared on "Oprah," signed an HGTV contract and published a book, "It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita." The New York Times Magazine dubbed her "queen of the mommy bloggers."

She was joined by the likes of "The Bloggess" Jenny Lawson, Ree Drummond of "Pioneer Woman," Kristen Howerton of "Rage Against the Minivan" and Glennon Doyle of "Momastery," who write about issues of mental health, race, marriage, education and politics alongside the mundane matters of diapers and minivans. Reading their blogs gives you the feeling that you are peeking into their diaries. This is what everyday life - real life - looks like.

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But the biggest stars of the mommy Internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They're curators of life. They're influencers. They're pitchwomen. And with all the photos of minimalist kitchens and the explosion of affiliate links, we've lost a source of support and community, a place to share vulnerability and find like-minded women, and a forum for female expertise and wisdom. "It's just so sad," says Armstrong. "It's all these staged, curated photos that don't show the messier part of life."

For me, the first few months of motherhood in 2016 were - as they are for many women - elating and discouraging. My daughter's first giggles made me cry, as did her first blowout diaper. I felt both #blessed and sometimes quite lonely. Members of my church brought meals, my girlfriends and sisters shared war stories over group texts, and my Facebook group of moms answered modern questions, such as "How do you organize all the digital photos of your baby?" Still, I wanted something more. I wanted to read the stories of people sharing my experience. During the tough moments, I wanted a mommy blogger's reassurance: "I've been there. It's awful. You will survive."

But instead, as I thumbed the screen of my phone during what felt like never-ending hours of breast-feeding, I found trips to Greece and carefully arranged living rooms. Social media doesn't nurture the authenticity and community I craved from the Internet as a new mom. The Facebook groups centered on transactional tips - I need advice or a product, so let's exchange ideas or baby gear - and rarely featured those journal-like entries of the earlier mom blogs. And Instagram is built for beauty (its filters make your life look better), not for rawness.

The death of the mom blog has something to do with shifts in how people consume and create on the Internet. Blogging on the whole has fizzled as audiences and writers have moved to other platforms. And parents with young children have made the transition along with everyone else - although their hours are somewhat more erratic. In 2016, Facebook (which owns Instagram) reported that new parents are especially active "in the wee hours," starting their first mobile visits as early as 4 a.m. By 7 a.m., 56 percent of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile devices.

Some bloggers use social networks to push people to their websites, but more and more, Instagram or Facebook is the destination. Mom bloggers "used to be able to easily reach their audience through search, RSS feeds or newsletter updates," notes Elizabeth Tenety, a former Washington Post colleague who co-founded the website Motherly, "but now that their core audience is trending towards hanging out on their phones - and by extension social media sites like Instagram and Facebook - the digital environment overall is less of a fit for those types of blogs." The shift to shorter posts and an emphasis on likes and hearts has changed the tone and content of what moms find online: more pictures, fewer words, less grit. The personal-essay industry has absorbed some of the fare that used to appear on mom blogs, but reading a viral post that shows up in your Facebook feed is very different from following a particular blogger.

Meanwhile, some of the mom brands of today's Internet operate in a niche, such as fitness, food, card-making or even calligraphy. And then there are those like the Shyba family, who shot to fame after staging photos of their puppy napping with their baby.

Bunmi Laditan, the woman behind the popular Twitter feed turned book "The Honest Toddler," says there are funny, authentic and interesting moms on those platforms, but there's also a trendy sameness to much of the content. "How many macarons can you look at? How much latte art can you consume? How many photos of babies in the cloth diaper on the minimalist kitchen counter can you see? It's visual Cheetos," she says. "You can't taste it after a while, but you keep eating it."

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Financial interests also clearly shape how people tell stories on the mom Internet now. "Advertising got a foothold and started having more and more say in things," Armstrong says.