Why web?
is a question that im sure, even subconsciously, you've thought of whilst browsing this site.
By 'web' i mean the personal web -- the "Indie Web" as it has come to be known. The idea that everybody can own and host a space for themselves and their thoughts. The idea that anybody can choose how that space looks and feels, and customise the ways in which their content can be viewed. Maybe you want to post photographs for your friends to see, maybe you want to keep track of all of your thoughts and feelings, maybe you want to archive your life even if it's only yourself who is going to see the archive. The web lets you.
Issues with centralisation.
Today, and quite rightly, most people would solve this by signing up to one of the thousands of companies happy to take your time and your data on the promise that you can do these things outlined. It could be an instagram account, a private twitter. It could be an online drive service offered by companies like google and microsoft. The modern way of using the net is centralised, the idea that everything you do is put in one place, operated by one company, on the promises of ease, discoverability, and zero hassle.
In reality, nobody likes these companies. Nobody likes twitter, nobody liked twitter even before elon got involved. Nobody particularly enjoys instagram or discord, or even sites like twitch. We use these services because they are easy, they do make us discoverable, and they are relatively zero-hassle. It helps that many of these sites are free to use! But we still dont like these platforms. It doesnt feel like our accounts are ours, it feels like our accounts are a depiction of ourselves that we've set up to play the system. Anybody who has mucked around with their discord profile to get everything just visually right - bio length, colour choice, etc - has done this without realising.
Furthermore, all of these platforms contain algorithms at the heart of how they work. All of them show you content not in the hopes that it's content from your friends or family, or content that you'd even particularly enjoy. It's solely content that keeps you on the app. Content that makes you addicted.
Our brains, believe it or not, need silence. They need moments of doing nothing. They need periods of wait.
In a modern algorithmic world, we are controlled by these companies to never have this time. The minute we feel bored, we reach for tiktok or twitter or instagram. Our brain is never given that time to wait.
Even sites that dont offer this addictive content stream, such as twitch and longform youtube, still feel icky to many people -- me included. I dont feel like i'm watching this stream on Twitch because it's on Twitch, i feel like i'm watching it on Twitch because the streamer had no other choice. Because Twitch is where everybody is, it's where everybody continues to be: no matter the individual's opinion of Amazon.
It's all well and good complaining and educating about these things, but the fact of the matter is that it's obvious, and common knowledge. Everybody knows that humans need to go outside more and spend less time on screens, everybody knows that constant content consumption is bad for you -- but nobody does anything about it. At the end of the day, we still open tiktok, or instagram, or youtube, or twitter, or one of the other thousands of addictive sites, simply because we feel as if we have no other choice.
If you're into reading, i'd recommend The Dose Effect by TJ Power. If you're not, know that he explains how slow dopamine is extremely important to human growth, and today we have almost none of it. All of the dopamine we get is quick release: eating a slice of cake, placing an order online, betting on live sports, checking a phone for notifications. Today, we dont have slow dopamine releases almost at all, and when we do they are often mitigated and downplayed by all of the quick-release dopamine surrounding it.
So, with all of this said, and it has been a lot, i return to the question asked in the title of this post. Why web? Why bother styling a website in utterly horrible to deal with html and css. Why bother sludging through a website builder or learning how to host a site. Why bother paying the money for a domain name?
Why the effort is worth it.
I wasn't alive in the days of the early internet, so bear with me as i reminisce about a past that i never experienced, but in the world where everybody owned their own space and could do with it what they please -- people were happier online.
There were issues with those days, there are issues with this model all around! Accessibility, exclusivity, discoverability are all worse and regularly completely missed when it's down to one person to make and maintain a system. And it wasnt some peaceful utopia either - people have been having furious arguments with strangers online since before the web existed, and plenty of people lost entire years to IRC and text adventures.
But none of that was designed. Nobody built a flame war on purpose, and nobody was measuring how long they could keep you in a chatroom. You logged on when you wanted to catch up with friends the same way you'd choose to walk into a pub or a park and meet up with people in real life. If you didn't want to, you stayed offline -- after all, you wouldn't want to be clogging the phone line up for no reason!
Under this system, it's not just that you couldn't experience the negatives to centralised social media -- those negatives couldnt even be fathomed. There were no damaging comparisons to be made. There was no constant stream of information being battered into your brain 24 hours per day. You got the information you wanted to see, and no more. You chose everything you saw. Under this system, you would find new content through recommendation from friends. You would find new content through email lists, email forums, or chatrooms. You would find new content from people. And in the world of Artificial Intelligence, doesn't that just sound lovely.
Somebody has to start somewhere. This utopia only works if everybody has a place to put their stuff -- if everybody has their own place that can be bookmarked and checked regularly by others. It doesnt matter how many people see it, there are no likes, there are no retweets. It is remarkably hard to appreciate how much those numbers shape you until you spend a while somewhere they dont exist. You write the post you wanted to write, and that's the end of it. Comments, were they not included on the web page, would be sent through email. They weren't public, it was one person talking to another person about something that they had made.
That sounds amazing.
To me, yes, all of this is more effort. But when has the better outcome ever been the easiest? There is no movement without, well, a movement. If you can take one thing away from this blog post, please have it be a raised awareness of how rotted our generation has become. Actually think about the word 'brainrot' for one moment, think about what those two words together imply.
Why is your own website the best way to do it?
There's a fair objection to be made here, which is that you can already do most of this somewhere else. Substack, Medium, Tumblr, Neocities, free static sites on somebody's hosting -- these already exist and some of them are genuinely lovely. But most of them are still somebody else's house, and the terms of your stay are still written by somebody who isnt you. The difference between those and your own site is really small... until the day it suddenly isnt.
Nobody else gets to decide what it looks like. Remember the discord profile with the bio trimmed to fit and the one colour picked as a header (provided you dont pay, of course!!). That's what expression looks like inside somebody else's box -- on your own site there is no box. If you want your writing in comic sans on a background of your cat, that is a decision available to you, and it will be more you than any profile page has ever managed.
It survives, too. Vine is gone. Google Reader is gone. Tumblr deleted half its culture overnight in 2018 to please an app store. Twitter's API went from free to unaffordable in a week and took a decade of tools with it. None of these were announced in advance, and in none of these cases did the people who'd spent years building something there get a say. If your host turns nasty, you copy your files somewhere else and point the domain at it. The address stays yours and nothing you've made goes with them.
The effort is a feature, not a bug. It's genuinely a faff to write a post, style it, and put it live, which means you only do it when you've actually got something to say. You cannot post to your own website out of boredom. That friction is the thing every platform has spent twenty years and billions of pounds engineering out and it's the thing that keeps what you make worth making.
It's also a place, rather than a feed. A post on twitter is a thing that happens to you and then is gone. A website is somewhere people go. It can be bookmarked, it can be put in an RSS reader, it can be linked from somebody else's page by someone who thought you were worth linking to. It sits still long enough to be found on purpose.
And -- my personal favourite point -- you'll have built something. This is the slow dopamine i was banging on about earlier. Learning enough HTML and CSS to make a page that works is a reward that takes weeks rather than seconds and the site itself ends up being a record of you getting better at it. You dont get that from choosing a theme.
None of this makes it easier. It makes it yours, which is a different thing entirely and, i'd argue, the more valuable one. So make one. It doesn't have to be good.
Thank you for reading.
I welcome your comment, i truly do. The indie web is about connecting humans with humans; something we might be lacking in today's age. Send me an email, DM me over discord, or leave a comment right under this post if that feature is available. Let me know what you think of this blog post and any blog post to come. If you found me linked on somebody else's web page, let me know that too! Sticking together might be all we have in these horrible times.
- Dia