The modern internet kind of sucks now. That may be blunt, but it is true. Social media used to feel like a place to connect with people, share things, and find communities. Now most of it is bloat, ads, rage bait, tracking, and algorithms trying to keep you scrolling as long as possible. You are not really the customer on most social media platforms. You are the product. These companies are selling your attention, your habits, your clicks, your likes, your interests, your location, and whatever else they can pull from you. They do not care if the internet is better. They care if you stay on their platform long enough to make them money.
That is not what made the internet fun. The internet was better when people had their own weird little corners of it. Back in the GeoCities days, websites were jank as hell, and that was fine. A lot of them looked terrible. Bad backgrounds, weird fonts, animated GIFs everywhere, guestbooks, hit counters, blinking text, random music playing in the background, and layouts that barely worked. But they had personality. You could tell someone made it. Not a company, not a brand team, and not some algorithm trying to optimize engagement. Just a person making something because they wanted to.
A lot of those old websites were broken, ugly, and badly designed, but they were also personal. The web felt more like a bunch of people building things instead of a handful of companies deciding what everyone gets to see. And the jank was not all bad, because that is how a lot of people learned tech. You wanted to change a background color, so you learned a little HTML. Then you wanted the page to look less awful, so you started messing with CSS. Then you wanted some dumb animation, menu, or effect, so you copied some JavaScript, broke everything, fixed part of it, and learned something along the way.
That is how I learned some of this stuff too. You did not need a class. You did not need permission. You just needed a website, a problem, and enough curiosity to keep messing with it until it worked. Modern platforms took a lot of that away. Now people type into boxes, upload into feeds, pick from templates, and let the platform decide how everything looks. That is easier, sure, but it also makes people users instead of builders.
That is why I like seeing things like IndieWeb and the /now page movement getting attention again. The idea behind IndieWeb is simple: own your domain, own your content, and make your website the main place your stuff lives. Use social media if you want, but do not make it your home. Make it the place you share links back to your actual home. The /now page idea is simple too. Instead of just having an About page that sits there forever, a now page tells people what you are doing right now, what you are working on, what you are focused on, and what is current in your life. I have one here: GeekKnight Now.
A personal website does not have to be fancy. It does not have to be perfect. Honestly, it probably should not be perfect. Make it yours. Put your thoughts there. Put your projects there. Put your links there. Put your dumb experiments there. Make it clean, make it ugly, make it jank, just make it yours.
Self-hosting is not that hard anymore either. You can run a site from an old computer, a mini PC, a cheap server, or whatever hardware you already have sitting around. With something like Cloudflare in front of it, you can handle DNS, HTTPS, caching, and get some protection from the garbage that hits anything exposed to the internet. Yes, I know using Cloudflare means it is not 100% pure self-hosting. I do not care. Purity is not the point. Control is the point.
If you are putting something online today, you need some help dealing with bots, attacks, random traffic, and all the other nonsense that comes with the modern internet. Cloudflare makes that easier and cheaper. That is a reasonable tradeoff. The point is to own your space again. Own the domain. Own the content. Own the place where your thoughts and projects live.
Social media can still be useful. I am not saying delete everything and go live in a cabin with a static HTML site. Use social media for discovery, quick posts, and sharing links. But do not let Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, or whatever comes next be the only place your online identity exists, because they can change the rules whenever they want. They can bury your posts, they can lock your account, they can kill features, they can flood the feed with ads, they can decide you need to pay to reach people who already chose to follow you; that is not your space, it’s theirs and you just rent it.
A personal website is different. It is yours. The web needs more of that again. More personal sites, more blogs, more now pages, more weird little projects, and more people learning by building things and breaking things. The internet was better when it had more personality, and the only way we get that back is if more people start building their own corners of it again.
Follow me, and I’ll post how I go about it time to time, and share your personal links in my Guestbook, and I’ll follow you back.GeekKnight Guestbook. Let’s build a personal community again, and get away from the billionaire assholes.