I made a website!

I finally took the plunge and started a website. I saw a video last night from LuvstarKei titled Why YOU Should Make a Website! It sent me down a rabbit hole and I realized there has been a revival of the personal website. People are motivated by a sense of nostalgia, dissatisfaction with social media, desire to own their own content, and the freedom that owning their own website entails.

Nostalgia

Back when I was a teenager, the internet was a different place from what it is now. Everyone was making personal websites. I got my start on a site called Expage, where I made a simple Harry Potter fansite. There were animated gifs, tiled backgrounds, blinkies, etc. Those things were staples of the internet back in those days.

When I was a little bit older, I got the urge to make something a little more complex than those little single-page websites. I built websites on a few different platforms over the years. GeoCities, Angelfire, AOL Homepage. It was a ton of fun. I also got really into pixel dolls, which was a driving force behind much of my website building in those days. I wanted to share my creations and be a part of that community.

People in those days communicated on forums, and there were different forums for every interest. Some were huge, with thousands of users online at any given time, others were tiny, only getting a handful of new posts a day. And slowly, over time, those old forums decreased in activity. Many are still sitting around on the internet like a time capsule, with their last posts over a decade ago, or, in many unfortunate cases, taken over by spam bots. You communicated with a smaller group of people on a more personal level. People were more authentic, sharing things because they wanted to share, not because they wanted to gain a following or make money.

The Internet Now

Nowadays, things are more centralized. People communicate mainly over large social media sites. A handful of companies control most of the content on the internet. Algorithms determine the content that we see. Many sites have even gone so far as to take away the simple feature of seeing the latest posts by your friends, instead filling your feed with sponsored posts and whatever content their algorithm has determined should be shown to you. You get online, wanting to see what your friends are up to, and instead, you’re looking at random hair styling videos and ads for robot cat toys that you get suckered into buying and your cat ignores.

We’ve lost a lot of the human element of the internet. Corporate interests use software to determine the content we are shown, which in this day and age, is often itself generated by software.

It’s depressing to realize that most of my time these days is spent on just a few websites and apps. So much of my browsing is on Reddit, and when I want to communicate with people I know, I go to Facebook. The unfortunate thing is that more of my Facebook feed is advertisements and suggested posts from pages I don’t even follow than it is my friends and family. I didn’t sign up because I wanted to look at pages that steal art without crediting the artist and get ads creepily tailored to what I’m likely to impulse buy. I signed up because I wanted to keep in touch with my loved ones.

Changes I Want to See

I want to get back to a more personal internet. I want to see content created by actual humans out of an authentic desire to share their creativity and connect with others. I want to explore what this revival of the personal internet has to offer. I want to follow blogs and independent artists. I want to participate in forums. I want to share links to sites I love. I want to start reading webcomics again.

And I want to spend less time on corporate-owned social media. I want less exposure to advertising. I want less exposure to algorithms that are built on dividing people into marketable categories and manipulating our thoughts. I want to get out of the echo chambers and connect with people on a human level.

And I want to contribute to this new era of the personal internet.

What I’m Going To Do Here

I’m planning on using this site to share whatever I feel is worth sharing. I want to express myself creatively again for the joy of doing it and share it in a way that is free of the pressures of social media. I want to write essays and stories, create characters and worlds, share art, and curate my own little personal corner of the internet. I want to capture some of the joys of my childhood.

I decided to make a WordPress site because I like that it has features built in for sharing and communicating with others. I considered making a static site with HTML and CSS, but this gives me a lot of features and makes it easier to add new content. I want a comment section and RSS feeds because I want anyone who wants to follow what I’m up to to have the means to keep up with me and leave messages. I know there’s going to be a learning curve, but I’m excited about trying this out and making it work.

If you’re still here, feel free to leave a comment and say hi. This is still really new, so bear with me while I get things set up. Feel free to share links to your personal websites. I’m going to create a links section eventually and I would love to share friends’ and family’s websites. Let’s break free from the shackles of social media and create a better world together!