I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.
At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON
And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.
I love your brother's site, so much. It looks like the web counter is still working, and that I'm not the only person from here checking it out, so I hope angelfire is ready for a bit of a "hug".
I wonder is this a sign of the times? I've (nearly ...) quit all social media and re-embraced my personal website. It's also under construction, but it's going to be the main place I update everything (work, personal, photos, updates etc.). I don't care if no one reads it. It's mine.
I think its really nice to have an own "digital garden".
In Germany you unfortunately have to dox yourself with stuff like this, and I really dont want people to know my address.
I know people will argue "thats only for business websites", but that's far from the truth. It's for every website that might(!) has a business aspect. So I couldn't even name products on a personal blog as that could be seen as advertisment that I got paid for...
The only way to find out would be in the Whois data, which is anonymised. The provider and registry will still have at least your billing information, but without a court order no user will be able to get it from them.
Granted, I'm not a native German speaker, but that's not my understanding of the "Impressumspflicht" law, if that's what you're referring to.
The law is mostly targeted at media and to some lesser extend businesses. The law is not enforced, and would be hard to enforce for individuals. For individuals, the law contradict multiple privacy laws, possibly the GDPR, and it might also conflict with some past rulings on the article 11th of the European Convention on Human rights. This article guarantees freedom of speech without persecutions, and one way to guarantee that is through anonymity.
My non-lawyer opinion is: people setting up an "Impressum" page on their personal websites in Germany are over-interpretating the law.
This is also the opinion of german lawyers[1]: "Impressumspflicht schön und gut - aber muss wirklich jeder Webseiten-Inhaber ein Impressum auf seiner Website führen? Ganz klar: Nein. Die Verpflichtung ein Impressum auf der eigenen Webseite einzubinden gilt nur bei geschäftsmäßigen Online-Diensten. Im Umkehrschluss brauchen Betreiber von Websites, die ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen kein Impressum auf ihrer Homepage einzubinden."
Regardless of this, if you still want to put an "Impressum" page just to be safe, you can buy a "Postfach" from the deutsche post for ~€20/year and use that as your "Impressum" address, this way you don't have to doxx yourself.
This is exactly what I was refering to though. "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" can refer to anything. A shop where you sell stuff or a blog in which you ~could~ advertise a product, even though its a personal blog. People over here got sued over not having one in their YouTube channel. There are plenty of "Abmahnanwälte" (Lawyers) who'd happily sue you, if there is a slight chance that you could've earned a few pennies with your website. The actual laws do a very bad job at defining what exactly "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" are.
To register a .de domain you need to give your address and legal name. And your national ccTLD is usually the only one that you are sure won't get pulled under you because there are some legally binding rules around it unlike .tv or .me
Is that specifically related to the Germany ccTLD or because you live in Germany? What would be the consequences of just... not doing it? Who even knows where a website author lives or publishes from?
20 years ago in the UK most ISPs gave you a little bit of web space free with your account - and an email box of two. One of the sad changes that happened is that this has gone now.
It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.
i agree it was very enticing to get started, OTOH having an email address linked to a particular ISP meant people not daring to change it and having to update their email everywhere
I suspect the support costs are greater than the advantages to the provider. And, in most cases, it's not like there are a lot of choices of ISP. These days also a lot of choices of free providers for a simple static website--GitHub, pages on Google Blogger, etc.
I remember an old friend of mine moved to the Orkneys, and used the free webspace to set up a webcam and site so we could keep in touch with him. Back in the late 90s this was kind of mind-blowing!
DMCA (and equivalent legislation in Europe) killed it. It was too risky for ISPs to allow users to have unmoderated, publicly accessible digital lockers that could be used for storing MP3s.
My understanding is that would be exempt from the regulations provided you ensure the comments are related to the content. But the legislation is super vague and IANAL.
I hope you take this the right way. Seeing your work gives me so much more confidence in my own creativity. I showed someone at the supply store a rough draft I had and they were encouraging, but also said I’ve never seen anything like it. Which is both possibly cool and doubtful.
I 1000% stand behind this. When I was thinking how I was going to make my personal website personal - I really had to think. One of the great charms in "websites of the past" is all of the neat gifs and unconventional formatting. It has really inspired me in making mine (it's still under construction at freesiagaul.com).
Of course I'm not amazing, but frontend should feel like art, because that's what it is.
Thanks, I appreciate it! :D I'm planning on making many more, and hoping as I get better I can make little ascii-characters look as if they're interacting with the site
When I moved into my current apartment I had a difficult task. On one hand, I wanted it to look modern and sleek. On the other, I wanted it to be mine. It's my apartment, nobody else's.
It is still huge work-in-progress and the amount of effort is way above reasonable amounts and it's going to be a problem once I want to sell the apartment, but I'm proud of myself, because I'm at the point where you can slowly see where things are going.
It is! For the latest incarnation of my blog I forwent comments in favor of a simple mailto: link at the bottom of each post which prefills the email subject with the post's title. I've had significantly fewer interactions with readers this way, but they've also been much more meaningful and insightful. There is a performative nature to public forums of any kind--and HN is not immune to this--that stifles any genuine discussion, or drowns it in a sea of attention-seekers.
Yes, I am aware of the hypocritical irony of complaining about online comments in an online comment.
This is a simple and great idea. I do something similar with my website. My newsletter is just a list of emails I have in a .txt file. I email to everyone when I write a blog post and we chat through email exchanges about it. The interactions feel more in-depth, and as you say, less performative as the exchange is just between us. Now I'm thinking of adding an email link at the end of every blog post with the blog title.
Personally, I wouldn't consider a blog without a newsfeed usable, newsletters are the wrong tool IMO (select push vs pull available to everyone without maintenance).
That's important, and what gives it the edge over peers, but IMO it's more than that. It's mainly that this is a specialized forum (so its community already has something in common beyond the lowest common denominator of politics) and it's dedicated to highly technical subjects (so contributors here tend to be more literalist and, let's say, spectrum-tending, which really helps with text communication). That's how I explain it.
As much as I like HN, I'm not sure the average discussion is all that, and for all its supposed virtues I don't see them in practice usually. But when there's a good thread, it's really good. I think it's worth navigating the churn for those. In real time or as an archive, there's lots of gold to be found.
But without moderation, there is decay over time. It will just happen more slowly in a purposeful forum, but it will happen. Before HN, there was Slashdot after all.
Yes, I agree. That's why I say it has the edge over its peers, i.e. Slashdot. But AFAIK Slashdot is still operating just fine. It's probably helped by its sophisticated distributed-moderation system, but surely mainly because it's the same kind of users as here.
It is nowadays, not just because of spam (there's both hosted and 3rd party solutions for that) but non-spam but unwanted / vile comments. Internet anonymity has always brought out the worst in people.
That was a fun read. Love the default theme and ability to swap themes. I recently deleted IG so maybe it’s time for a personal website. The world needs more 5 course meal generators :)
As an erstwhile teenaged Geocities fanatic, all these "old web was good, let's go back to it" posts miss some key factors that block such a way back.
1. Most of the Old Web site experiences were one-and-done. We checked out a website, then checked out the next one on the webring or Geocities neighborhood. Unless the site "looked" like it was updated with news, we generally didn't re-visit the site, or really even remember it. Your old website could feel just as disposable and stale as the average social media post.
2. RSS and algo-free chronological feeds won't return us to a time of civility. I have never stopped using RSS. But the system isn't designed to support a feed where 10% of the sites post 90% of the content. The experience is awful, there is no way to order things so as to see a diversified feed. RSS of course also flattens web pages into a lifeless scroll of text, defeating the purpose of home-made web pages.
3. Webdev is too complicated now compared to a time when your ISP gave you an FTP folder and Notepad was all that was needed to write some HTML and display some images. Modern webdev (code editor, SSL, hosting, mobile-ready CSS) creates an adverse selection problem where the people with the time and skill to make websites, already do so in their work and thus create the most boring websites imaginable....code-heavy tech blogs or wispy 'digital transformation' thought leadership.
I set up my personal website [0] quite a while ago - 2020 or so. I've been updating it a lot more regularly in the last few years and I've found it very rewarding. It's great to have my own place where I am in full control of everything, and I've also learned a lot about webdev which is not my core focus usually.
The best part by far is people going out of their way to get in touch & let me know that the found a post of mine interesting or useful.
I think in the context of this article, 2020 is very recent. But otherwise, yes I agree.
Incidentally, my own site started out in 1999 as a personal site, became a poster for my writing, then back to a personal site and is now a poster for my tutoring. All the old content is still there, just with a different emphasis https://richardtaylor.co.uk/
I hadn't even learned how to walk in 1999, let alone host a personal website!
I grew up during a bit a transitional period of the internet. My earliest memories involve playing Flash games on Newgrounds, reading about Bionicle lore online & listening to Cryoshell and Daughtry, thanks again to Bionicle. I also used to hang out on quite a few internet forums. While this is not quite the "personal website" internet advocated for in the post, it's a lot rougher and edgier than the Facebooks & Instagrams we have today.
Amongst my peers it's not really 'normal' to have a personal website - I only know one person IRL who does that, and we met because I noticed he was coding in Haskell while I was performing live music at a pub!
I do fear that personal websites will become less and less common - young techies these days basically grew up in the big tech walled gardens without any chance to experience the rougher, non-commercial web of yore. The idea of going through all the trouble to get a website going may seem pointless in a world where everyone you know is on Instagram.
Yay! We have lots of Bionicles in the house still. My boys used to buy me a new one when I started a new job for my desk - when working in the office was a thing.
Not having your own website is an opportunity missed for techies especially, I think.
The first love letter I've enjoyed reading in quite some time. It left me wondering if my minimal, rarely updated website of ~12 years qualifies since it's hosted on big tech backed Github pages.
Is there a place/system for discovering or aggregating personal websites like this? Remember old school "directory" sites and tools like del.icio.us? There were awesome compared to being at the mercy of google.
I've been into the "personal website" world as well recently, and one thing I've noticed is a lot of personal websites end up linking to each other, or have a "Blogroll" [0]. This pretty much acts as an aggregator to point you to other sites that might be similar to the author's.
Personally, I've just been keeping a running list in my notes for cool personal sites I find / subscribing to the RSS feed if it has one, mostly discovered from exploring the interlinking web in this space.
+1 to this! If it doesn't exist already, what would it look like?
The simple solution could be another search index that hasn't been commoditized like Google has, but I wonder if a manual curation approach might lead to higher quality? Something along the lines of a weekly digest of personal sites that are interesting/unique/fun. Process could look like:
1. Users submit their personal sites for review, accompanied by some blurb/tags. Essentially something to make the cost of submission > 0.
2. Site admin reviews submissions once a week and either select their top X favorite, or just remove any low quality/slop submissions and shares the rest.
I suppose this approach depends on the judgement of whoever does the curating, but I feel like that's not necessarily a worse alternative to the opaque algorithms we deal with today.
Definitely some level of human curation... that's what made del.icio.us so good IMHO. You knew the links posted had a level of (probably nerdy) oversight.
I like it because the submissions are easy and I think curated / QC’d. I thought Kagi was going to do more with https://kagi.com/smallweb but it’s kind of like going to https://wiby.me/ and hitting “surprise me”, which everyone should do at least once a day.
I don't remember the last time I had so much fun building a web project than working on my personal website: https://dmilicic.com/
The spirit of doing what you want is exactly what inspired me to do it, it's not the best nor the fastest web but it doesn't matter, I simply wanted to do it in a different way (Flutter & WASM).
I really enjoyed this and the ensuing conversation here. Great list of links at the end too! Always looking for things to bookmark as inspiring motivators on days when it all feels pointless - this is going on the list.
I think people who'd like to bring a piece of old world back have a blind spot for the fact that social networks and their algorithms provide essential service of content discovery and possibly enabling building up on existing content (comments, reactions).
Any attempt to bring back home pages must essentially include a way to discover them. Search engines has been dead for that purpose for more than a decade.
If you want to give back autonomy to publishers, your solution must also grant the same autonomy to commenters. You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.
>You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.
Not at all. On my webpage/blog, if I have comments enabled, I absolutely have the right to erase your comment or just not make it visible in the first place.
Nobody is going to comment because of that, among other things.
Imagine you published a blog but the hosting provider could delete it any time they want or just not make it visible in the first place. It would be unfair because you are paying money, but readers/commenters of your posts pay with their effort and if they have no guarantee of you honoring your informal obligations they won't be doing that for you.
It's ironic that you are commenting on this site where moderators will absolutely erase content they feel is inappropriate. I will do the same on my blog--assuming Google hasn't just scrubbed what they consider spam in the first place.
You might find that ironic or you might try to figure out why they are commenting here not somewhere else. You won't be able to replicate it on a single blog. But any attempt to bring back blogs as a viable choice for others will need to replicate what hn, Facebook, Twitter already do and improve upon it.
The web went the way it went because ultimately centralization wins both in terms economics and discoverability. You host your blog (or rather "blog") on Facebook for free and get a chance to be discovered by strangers, for better or worse.
Not saying it's necessarily a good thing, because now you are at a mercy of corporate censorship that isn't even required to abide by the users' constitutional rights and freedoms. They can limit your speech in any way they like and it's what they do: their platform, their rules.
On the other hand, without centralization the web is expensive and not very discoverable. Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
A lot here depends on how much you care about discoverability. If you want to earn money off your website, then sure, you care a lot about discoverability. But the post in question is about creating, about having your own space, about art. Sure, having other people look at your art is cool, but it isn't necessary to do art.
If you want people to look at your website, ask them to.
The indie web motto/practice for this is "publish own site, syndicate elsewhere" (often abbreviated as posse). Rather blog on Facebook, just share links to your site there. The only issue is comments since people will usually comment on the platform link is posted (HN is also an example) rather than on site. Though some will argue not having comments on site is a good thing.
I don't know if I fully agree with your "centralization always wins" take- I think factually you're right, but that's ignoring the fact that most countries apply some kind of anti-monopoly laws that break up centralization.
The internet became dominated by a few large websites not just out of economic necessity, but out of the specific economic conditions that are mostly in the US (large companies and few anti-monopoly enforcements)
I'm... about 14 months in this time - a digital garden, not a blog. Still updating several times a month. I think I got delisted by Google at the tail end of last year (not that I ever got many hits). I'm quite happy with that.
I write notes on what interests me in the moment, occasionally I go back and edit, sometimes I send links to friends. No plan, no goal, only whim. Obviously if you're writing for attention mine is a terrible approach, but then... if you want maximum attention, should you be writing at all? Shouldn't you be on a video platform?
The small web will always, I think, be at the margins of the internet for all the reasons you list. Dandelions growing in pavement cracks.
The article ends with a list of web sites that you should check out. This is how discoverability worked in the early web days and that is how it can still work. People link to other pages. The joy of "surfing the web" is about starting somewhere and then walking off into some unforeseen direction to discover new places on the web.
Links were placed by humans. They were curated. They were organic. And they can still have these qualities today.
We should start a movement among personal-blog people, where each personal website is encouraged to attach 1 to 5 (to not overwhelm) link to other personal websites they find interesting.
That way, if the chain is solid enough, we can bring back the notion of "surfing the internet"
They were also horribly inefficient and promptly got outcompeted and outselected by centralization, about as unceremoniously as small tribes got dominated by the various historical empires.
Do the basics from page speed index and you will be fine. Most personal websites will be static sites. Just make it hit 100 in all the four categories. Or use a theme which does that for your SSG. It's not that hard. And most importantly, don't try to swim against the tide. Leave it as it is. My website does pretty OK.
And another important thing, don't worry about google ranking. There is nothing you can do about it. Create as much organic traffic as possible. Leave out all the rest.
For what it's worth, I don't think Instagram has much discoverability. Not anymore, anyway. The only content you can discover is lowest common denominator stuff. Thirst traps, cute animals, influencer crap, etc.
Mojuba's law says: "Over time, everything tends towards mediocrity" :) which is exactly what you described as lowest common denominator, it's the same thing.
This is true in practically everything if you think about it. Car and furniture designs. Social networks. Politics. Art, cinema, even music. At first there's novelty and excitement, then comes commoditization and mediocrity, almost like a law of nature.
It's crazy people don't understand the web didn't die-- it was killed to prioritize r/SEO scammer-type content from the subcontinent.
I've been building websites my whole life, but my main niche is music, and one of my big sites is kpopping.com
Now I have the best database, bar none, in this niche for a decade now. It's not even close. But instead of gradually ascending to the top of google's results, my webapp has to rely on donations and subscriptions to survive because Google cannot get enough of content from the hindustani times and purple wordpress blogs. They even literally had pornography ads for months on a kpop site. It didn't matter. 20M+ a month. Welcome to google and the main reason nothing gets built.
Your site covers perhaps the most oversaturated genre of Internet content: ad-stuffed K-Pop sites. It's unfortunate that content mills are doing better than you in this area, but the decline of the personal Internet being discussed in this article is occurring specifically because sites like yours monetized "content", attracting competitors that saturated the net with trash.
> Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Agreed. And so what?
My friend maintains a tomato garden on his roof. Are his tomatoes ever going to win a greenhouse competition? No. Did he find it a worthwhile use of his time to grow them? Yes.
Building a website should not be a resume talking point, nor does it have to strike a telling blow for 'free speech', whatever that even means in a world where the rich and powerful are obeying in advance.
> Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about
Yet, cacti thrive in the desert, uncaring about the opinions of others.
> in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Inherently, the Web doesn't carry "maximizing an audience" as a maxim. That's an expectation that the Web's denizens have come to believe in as a matter of principle: the only valuable reason to put anything online, is because you intend to cater to an audience.
That doesn't exclude owning a personal website that you'd just peruse for your own sake. In fact, the author writes as much:
> You can write at length, ramble nonsensically, and people can choose to read it or not. It’s about putting things out on the internet for yourself.
Like, sure, there are platforms where you could share cooking recipes. But maybe that's not something you want for yourself, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to attract undue attention, and you just want to keep them in your own quiet corner of the Web, for yourself.
You might want to write for the sake of the craft of writing, and use the Web as your medium, rather then paper. Others happening to stumble on your work, is just a by-product of your choice to publish thoughts on the Web.
Maybe you don't care about search engines, and if you need someone to find your work, well, you can just hand them an URL.
From your perspective, all of that may sound horribly inefficient, and that's true, it is inefficient and not the right way to do things if your express goal were to cater to large audiences. But that doesn't make it any less valid an option to approach the Web.
> There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
Well, my argument is that the Web, such as it was, experienced an Eternal September with the advent of social media and mobile devices. Suddenly, everyone could reach an audience with nothing but a smartphone. And that notion caused millions, billions, flocking to those few central platforms that catered to this apparent want, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Whereas, do you thoughts and intentions really need to be shown in front of an audience of billions, just because that's possible now? Of course not.
Wanting to be like a cactus is perfectly valid, giving your thoughts a quiet spot in some corner of the Web you can call your own, not having to worry about likes, favorites, comments, shares or clicks. As long as doing so caters to your own intentions.
People who host their own websites are becoming like vegans in that they won't STFU about it. Having your own website is not a substitute for having a personality.
I remember back in the summer of 1996 in Pakistan our household was one of the first few to have to internet.
At that time angelfire.com used to give free webspace. My brother got hold of a pirated version of CorelDraw and setup a fan website of his favorite rock band Junoon, which incidentally is still online: https://www.angelfire.com/pa/JUNOON
And then when my brother met the band at a concert and they actually recognized him due to the website. I guess first time we realized how impactful internet is going to be.
I love your brother's site, so much. It looks like the web counter is still working, and that I'm not the only person from here checking it out, so I hope angelfire is ready for a bit of a "hug".
I wonder is this a sign of the times? I've (nearly ...) quit all social media and re-embraced my personal website. It's also under construction, but it's going to be the main place I update everything (work, personal, photos, updates etc.). I don't care if no one reads it. It's mine.
I think its really nice to have an own "digital garden".
In Germany you unfortunately have to dox yourself with stuff like this, and I really dont want people to know my address.
I know people will argue "thats only for business websites", but that's far from the truth. It's for every website that might(!) has a business aspect. So I couldn't even name products on a personal blog as that could be seen as advertisment that I got paid for...
I hate this country so much.
Get a .com domain from a provider with Whois privacy and don't add an impress. Done.
Wouldnt people still be able to just lookup who the domain owner is?
The only way to find out would be in the Whois data, which is anonymised. The provider and registry will still have at least your billing information, but without a court order no user will be able to get it from them.
That might be a cool option then, ill look into that
If you do not need a domain you can also publish a static page as your blog on Github: https://pages.github.com
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/respect
Granted, I'm not a native German speaker, but that's not my understanding of the "Impressumspflicht" law, if that's what you're referring to.
The law is mostly targeted at media and to some lesser extend businesses. The law is not enforced, and would be hard to enforce for individuals. For individuals, the law contradict multiple privacy laws, possibly the GDPR, and it might also conflict with some past rulings on the article 11th of the European Convention on Human rights. This article guarantees freedom of speech without persecutions, and one way to guarantee that is through anonymity.
My non-lawyer opinion is: people setting up an "Impressum" page on their personal websites in Germany are over-interpretating the law.
This is also the opinion of german lawyers[1]: "Impressumspflicht schön und gut - aber muss wirklich jeder Webseiten-Inhaber ein Impressum auf seiner Website führen? Ganz klar: Nein. Die Verpflichtung ein Impressum auf der eigenen Webseite einzubinden gilt nur bei geschäftsmäßigen Online-Diensten. Im Umkehrschluss brauchen Betreiber von Websites, die ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen kein Impressum auf ihrer Homepage einzubinden."
Regardless of this, if you still want to put an "Impressum" page just to be safe, you can buy a "Postfach" from the deutsche post for ~€20/year and use that as your "Impressum" address, this way you don't have to doxx yourself.
[1] https://www.e-recht24.de/impressum/13095-impressum-fuer-die-...
This is exactly what I was refering to though. "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" can refer to anything. A shop where you sell stuff or a blog in which you ~could~ advertise a product, even though its a personal blog. People over here got sued over not having one in their YouTube channel. There are plenty of "Abmahnanwälte" (Lawyers) who'd happily sue you, if there is a slight chance that you could've earned a few pennies with your website. The actual laws do a very bad job at defining what exactly "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" are.
Why do you have to dox yourself in Germany?
I think he is referring to this section 3 https://www.denic.de/en/content-pool/denic-domain-terms-and-...
To register a .de domain you need to give your address and legal name. And your national ccTLD is usually the only one that you are sure won't get pulled under you because there are some legally binding rules around it unlike .tv or .me
Its because of "Impressumspflicht" which requires me to have my legal name, address and phone number in an imprint on my website.
Is that specifically related to the Germany ccTLD or because you live in Germany? What would be the consequences of just... not doing it? Who even knows where a website author lives or publishes from?
If you are publishing from your own (German) domain in Germany, you will need to add an impress with your personal address.
And the AI scrapers love you for it, as much as a machine can love.
20 years ago in the UK most ISPs gave you a little bit of web space free with your account - and an email box of two. One of the sad changes that happened is that this has gone now.
It used to make it really easy to have a cool little website. I used mine for a simple blog - now gone.
i agree it was very enticing to get started, OTOH having an email address linked to a particular ISP meant people not daring to change it and having to update their email everywhere
Which makes it doubly odd that they are getting rid of it.
I have my email grandfathered in by my ISP (Virginmrdia) but they don’t offer it to new customers.
I use it with my own domain name that redirects to the Virginmedia box, so not tied to them.
I suspect the support costs are greater than the advantages to the provider. And, in most cases, it's not like there are a lot of choices of ISP. These days also a lot of choices of free providers for a simple static website--GitHub, pages on Google Blogger, etc.
I remember an old friend of mine moved to the Orkneys, and used the free webspace to set up a webcam and site so we could keep in touch with him. Back in the late 90s this was kind of mind-blowing!
DMCA (and equivalent legislation in Europe) killed it. It was too risky for ISPs to allow users to have unmoderated, publicly accessible digital lockers that could be used for storing MP3s.
That’s how I published my first webpage. Mindspring, baby! And then I later upgraded to a much more sophisticated web host with a cgi-bin.
If they have any kind of comments box it’s pretty ambiguous as to whether or not your personal home pages is illegal now in the UK.
TBH I wouldn't expose unfiltered comment boxes on today's internet anyway. That's guaranteed web spam plus a small but non-zero security risk.
Maybe one where comments only show up after I manually approve each one.
My understanding is that would be exempt from the regulations provided you ensure the comments are related to the content. But the legislation is super vague and IANAL.
Based on which law?
Online Safety Act.
Shout out to my favorite one-joke website, https://www.sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ which has remained a constant in my life over the years and has never let me down
glad to be of service
I hope you take this the right way. Seeing your work gives me so much more confidence in my own creativity. I showed someone at the supply store a rough draft I had and they were encouraging, but also said I’ve never seen anything like it. Which is both possibly cool and doubtful.
I 1000% stand behind this. When I was thinking how I was going to make my personal website personal - I really had to think. One of the great charms in "websites of the past" is all of the neat gifs and unconventional formatting. It has really inspired me in making mine (it's still under construction at freesiagaul.com).
Of course I'm not amazing, but frontend should feel like art, because that's what it is.
Awesome animation in the start.
Thanks! :D
I love the animation on your start page. Well done!
Thanks, I appreciate it! :D I'm planning on making many more, and hoping as I get better I can make little ascii-characters look as if they're interacting with the site
https://github.com/freesiagaul/site-ascii The code is super bare-bones for now, but it's been a great learning exercise for someone from an EE background
When I moved into my current apartment I had a difficult task. On one hand, I wanted it to look modern and sleek. On the other, I wanted it to be mine. It's my apartment, nobody else's.
It is still huge work-in-progress and the amount of effort is way above reasonable amounts and it's going to be a problem once I want to sell the apartment, but I'm proud of myself, because I'm at the point where you can slowly see where things are going.
I think the addition of "comments" on webpage is more of a cruse than a blessing.
It is! For the latest incarnation of my blog I forwent comments in favor of a simple mailto: link at the bottom of each post which prefills the email subject with the post's title. I've had significantly fewer interactions with readers this way, but they've also been much more meaningful and insightful. There is a performative nature to public forums of any kind--and HN is not immune to this--that stifles any genuine discussion, or drowns it in a sea of attention-seekers.
Yes, I am aware of the hypocritical irony of complaining about online comments in an online comment.
This is a simple and great idea. I do something similar with my website. My newsletter is just a list of emails I have in a .txt file. I email to everyone when I write a blog post and we chat through email exchanges about it. The interactions feel more in-depth, and as you say, less performative as the exchange is just between us. Now I'm thinking of adding an email link at the end of every blog post with the blog title.
Personally, I wouldn't consider a blog without a newsfeed usable, newsletters are the wrong tool IMO (select push vs pull available to everyone without maintenance).
(In Ballmer's voice) RSS! RSS! RSS!
That's exactly what I do and it works great.
Isn’t Hacker News a form of a comment section?
It is, but HN has the saving grace that dang is an angel and Y Combinator pays him to do the chores every day.
That's important, and what gives it the edge over peers, but IMO it's more than that. It's mainly that this is a specialized forum (so its community already has something in common beyond the lowest common denominator of politics) and it's dedicated to highly technical subjects (so contributors here tend to be more literalist and, let's say, spectrum-tending, which really helps with text communication). That's how I explain it.
As much as I like HN, I'm not sure the average discussion is all that, and for all its supposed virtues I don't see them in practice usually. But when there's a good thread, it's really good. I think it's worth navigating the churn for those. In real time or as an archive, there's lots of gold to be found.
But without moderation, there is decay over time. It will just happen more slowly in a purposeful forum, but it will happen. Before HN, there was Slashdot after all.
Yes, I agree. That's why I say it has the edge over its peers, i.e. Slashdot. But AFAIK Slashdot is still operating just fine. It's probably helped by its sophisticated distributed-moderation system, but surely mainly because it's the same kind of users as here.
It is nowadays, not just because of spam (there's both hosted and 3rd party solutions for that) but non-spam but unwanted / vile comments. Internet anonymity has always brought out the worst in people.
That was a fun read. Love the default theme and ability to swap themes. I recently deleted IG so maybe it’s time for a personal website. The world needs more 5 course meal generators :)
oh thanks i missed that, the hours i spent on the CSS zen garden!
As an erstwhile teenaged Geocities fanatic, all these "old web was good, let's go back to it" posts miss some key factors that block such a way back.
1. Most of the Old Web site experiences were one-and-done. We checked out a website, then checked out the next one on the webring or Geocities neighborhood. Unless the site "looked" like it was updated with news, we generally didn't re-visit the site, or really even remember it. Your old website could feel just as disposable and stale as the average social media post.
2. RSS and algo-free chronological feeds won't return us to a time of civility. I have never stopped using RSS. But the system isn't designed to support a feed where 10% of the sites post 90% of the content. The experience is awful, there is no way to order things so as to see a diversified feed. RSS of course also flattens web pages into a lifeless scroll of text, defeating the purpose of home-made web pages.
3. Webdev is too complicated now compared to a time when your ISP gave you an FTP folder and Notepad was all that was needed to write some HTML and display some images. Modern webdev (code editor, SSL, hosting, mobile-ready CSS) creates an adverse selection problem where the people with the time and skill to make websites, already do so in their work and thus create the most boring websites imaginable....code-heavy tech blogs or wispy 'digital transformation' thought leadership.
I agree with you on rss 100%.
I set up my personal website [0] quite a while ago - 2020 or so. I've been updating it a lot more regularly in the last few years and I've found it very rewarding. It's great to have my own place where I am in full control of everything, and I've also learned a lot about webdev which is not my core focus usually.
The best part by far is people going out of their way to get in touch & let me know that the found a post of mine interesting or useful.
[0] https://tiniuc.com
"quite a while ago - 2020"
I think in the context of this article, 2020 is very recent. But otherwise, yes I agree.
Incidentally, my own site started out in 1999 as a personal site, became a poster for my writing, then back to a personal site and is now a poster for my tutoring. All the old content is still there, just with a different emphasis https://richardtaylor.co.uk/
I hadn't even learned how to walk in 1999, let alone host a personal website!
I grew up during a bit a transitional period of the internet. My earliest memories involve playing Flash games on Newgrounds, reading about Bionicle lore online & listening to Cryoshell and Daughtry, thanks again to Bionicle. I also used to hang out on quite a few internet forums. While this is not quite the "personal website" internet advocated for in the post, it's a lot rougher and edgier than the Facebooks & Instagrams we have today.
Amongst my peers it's not really 'normal' to have a personal website - I only know one person IRL who does that, and we met because I noticed he was coding in Haskell while I was performing live music at a pub!
I do fear that personal websites will become less and less common - young techies these days basically grew up in the big tech walled gardens without any chance to experience the rougher, non-commercial web of yore. The idea of going through all the trouble to get a website going may seem pointless in a world where everyone you know is on Instagram.
Yay! We have lots of Bionicles in the house still. My boys used to buy me a new one when I started a new job for my desk - when working in the office was a thing.
Not having your own website is an opportunity missed for techies especially, I think.
Hah, I have some Bohrok on my desk right now! Got into collecting them again last year.
The first love letter I've enjoyed reading in quite some time. It left me wondering if my minimal, rarely updated website of ~12 years qualifies since it's hosted on big tech backed Github pages.
I found this (super short) episode inspiring, on the same topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5n6BYw5VU7cLipoRKE1COU (The Poetic Internet, with Kristoffer Tjalve)
Is there a place/system for discovering or aggregating personal websites like this? Remember old school "directory" sites and tools like del.icio.us? There were awesome compared to being at the mercy of google.
I just have bookmarks to directory sites, as you say, like https://ooh.directory/
This is awesome, I like it.
I've been into the "personal website" world as well recently, and one thing I've noticed is a lot of personal websites end up linking to each other, or have a "Blogroll" [0]. This pretty much acts as an aggregator to point you to other sites that might be similar to the author's.
Personally, I've just been keeping a running list in my notes for cool personal sites I find / subscribing to the RSS feed if it has one, mostly discovered from exploring the interlinking web in this space.
[0] https://www.lkhrs.com/blogroll/ (not my site but an awesome personal site)
Check out the following:
- https://indieblog.page/
- https://blogdb.org/
- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
+1 to this! If it doesn't exist already, what would it look like?
The simple solution could be another search index that hasn't been commoditized like Google has, but I wonder if a manual curation approach might lead to higher quality? Something along the lines of a weekly digest of personal sites that are interesting/unique/fun. Process could look like:
I suppose this approach depends on the judgement of whoever does the curating, but I feel like that's not necessarily a worse alternative to the opaque algorithms we deal with today.Definitely some level of human curation... that's what made del.icio.us so good IMHO. You knew the links posted had a level of (probably nerdy) oversight.
Never mind, sounds like https://ooh.directory/ that listenfaster shared is essentially this!
I like it because the submissions are easy and I think curated / QC’d. I thought Kagi was going to do more with https://kagi.com/smallweb but it’s kind of like going to https://wiby.me/ and hitting “surprise me”, which everyone should do at least once a day.
Remember StumbleUpon?
Pepperidge farm remembers.
This is so great!
I am working on this - https://personal-logs.vercel.app/anime
I don't remember the last time I had so much fun building a web project than working on my personal website: https://dmilicic.com/
The spirit of doing what you want is exactly what inspired me to do it, it's not the best nor the fastest web but it doesn't matter, I simply wanted to do it in a different way (Flutter & WASM).
I expected to see an "under construction" animated gif, but what I found was better.
The garden theme made me smile. Now, I'm considering redesigning my website.
I removed the links from my website a decade ago, but I enjoyed looking at the section on the page. Not sure what I'll do about it.
I really enjoyed this and the ensuing conversation here. Great list of links at the end too! Always looking for things to bookmark as inspiring motivators on days when it all feels pointless - this is going on the list.
More on the POSSE approach (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
I think people who'd like to bring a piece of old world back have a blind spot for the fact that social networks and their algorithms provide essential service of content discovery and possibly enabling building up on existing content (comments, reactions).
Any attempt to bring back home pages must essentially include a way to discover them. Search engines has been dead for that purpose for more than a decade.
If you want to give back autonomy to publishers, your solution must also grant the same autonomy to commenters. You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.
>You need to enable all people to control their content, whether they are original posters or pre-posters and commenters.
Not at all. On my webpage/blog, if I have comments enabled, I absolutely have the right to erase your comment or just not make it visible in the first place.
Nobody is going to comment because of that, among other things.
Imagine you published a blog but the hosting provider could delete it any time they want or just not make it visible in the first place. It would be unfair because you are paying money, but readers/commenters of your posts pay with their effort and if they have no guarantee of you honoring your informal obligations they won't be doing that for you.
It's ironic that you are commenting on this site where moderators will absolutely erase content they feel is inappropriate. I will do the same on my blog--assuming Google hasn't just scrubbed what they consider spam in the first place.
You might find that ironic or you might try to figure out why they are commenting here not somewhere else. You won't be able to replicate it on a single blog. But any attempt to bring back blogs as a viable choice for others will need to replicate what hn, Facebook, Twitter already do and improve upon it.
And not a word about discoverability?
The web went the way it went because ultimately centralization wins both in terms economics and discoverability. You host your blog (or rather "blog") on Facebook for free and get a chance to be discovered by strangers, for better or worse.
Not saying it's necessarily a good thing, because now you are at a mercy of corporate censorship that isn't even required to abide by the users' constitutional rights and freedoms. They can limit your speech in any way they like and it's what they do: their platform, their rules.
On the other hand, without centralization the web is expensive and not very discoverable. Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
A lot here depends on how much you care about discoverability. If you want to earn money off your website, then sure, you care a lot about discoverability. But the post in question is about creating, about having your own space, about art. Sure, having other people look at your art is cool, but it isn't necessary to do art.
If you want people to look at your website, ask them to.
The indie web motto/practice for this is "publish own site, syndicate elsewhere" (often abbreviated as posse). Rather blog on Facebook, just share links to your site there. The only issue is comments since people will usually comment on the platform link is posted (HN is also an example) rather than on site. Though some will argue not having comments on site is a good thing.
I don't know if I fully agree with your "centralization always wins" take- I think factually you're right, but that's ignoring the fact that most countries apply some kind of anti-monopoly laws that break up centralization.
The internet became dominated by a few large websites not just out of economic necessity, but out of the specific economic conditions that are mostly in the US (large companies and few anti-monopoly enforcements)
Nowadays your "blog" in Facebook has less chance to be discovered by actual humans than any random self-hosted blog.
This feels right. I wonder if it’s true.
Different goals.
I'm... about 14 months in this time - a digital garden, not a blog. Still updating several times a month. I think I got delisted by Google at the tail end of last year (not that I ever got many hits). I'm quite happy with that.
I write notes on what interests me in the moment, occasionally I go back and edit, sometimes I send links to friends. No plan, no goal, only whim. Obviously if you're writing for attention mine is a terrible approach, but then... if you want maximum attention, should you be writing at all? Shouldn't you be on a video platform?
The small web will always, I think, be at the margins of the internet for all the reasons you list. Dandelions growing in pavement cracks.
> And not a word about discoverability?
The article ends with a list of web sites that you should check out. This is how discoverability worked in the early web days and that is how it can still work. People link to other pages. The joy of "surfing the web" is about starting somewhere and then walking off into some unforeseen direction to discover new places on the web.
Links were placed by humans. They were curated. They were organic. And they can still have these qualities today.
We should start a movement among personal-blog people, where each personal website is encouraged to attach 1 to 5 (to not overwhelm) link to other personal websites they find interesting.
That way, if the chain is solid enough, we can bring back the notion of "surfing the internet"
They were also horribly inefficient and promptly got outcompeted and outselected by centralization, about as unceremoniously as small tribes got dominated by the various historical empires.
Inefficient by which metric?
don't forget Webrings :D
Do the basics from page speed index and you will be fine. Most personal websites will be static sites. Just make it hit 100 in all the four categories. Or use a theme which does that for your SSG. It's not that hard. And most importantly, don't try to swim against the tide. Leave it as it is. My website does pretty OK.
And another important thing, don't worry about google ranking. There is nothing you can do about it. Create as much organic traffic as possible. Leave out all the rest.
For what it's worth, I don't think Instagram has much discoverability. Not anymore, anyway. The only content you can discover is lowest common denominator stuff. Thirst traps, cute animals, influencer crap, etc.
Mojuba's law says: "Over time, everything tends towards mediocrity" :) which is exactly what you described as lowest common denominator, it's the same thing.
This is true in practically everything if you think about it. Car and furniture designs. Social networks. Politics. Art, cinema, even music. At first there's novelty and excitement, then comes commoditization and mediocrity, almost like a law of nature.
Regression to the mean.
I think that’s right.
In my case, I think my Instagram experience would be improved if I could automatically block every profile which advertises a link to their OnlyFans.
Alas, frustration with this experience also counts as engagement to their telemetry, so this won’t ever get better.
It's crazy people don't understand the web didn't die-- it was killed to prioritize r/SEO scammer-type content from the subcontinent.
I've been building websites my whole life, but my main niche is music, and one of my big sites is kpopping.com
Now I have the best database, bar none, in this niche for a decade now. It's not even close. But instead of gradually ascending to the top of google's results, my webapp has to rely on donations and subscriptions to survive because Google cannot get enough of content from the hindustani times and purple wordpress blogs. They even literally had pornography ads for months on a kpop site. It didn't matter. 20M+ a month. Welcome to google and the main reason nothing gets built.
seo researcher shocked about it: https://x.com/paulkimio/status/1550532282288508929
my twitter rant about it: https://x.com/ohgoshnotthat/status/1894487513642791270
Your site covers perhaps the most oversaturated genre of Internet content: ad-stuffed K-Pop sites. It's unfortunate that content mills are doing better than you in this area, but the decline of the personal Internet being discussed in this article is occurring specifically because sites like yours monetized "content", attracting competitors that saturated the net with trash.
What a confusing world you must live in being unable to discern cause and effect
> Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about, in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Agreed. And so what?
My friend maintains a tomato garden on his roof. Are his tomatoes ever going to win a greenhouse competition? No. Did he find it a worthwhile use of his time to grow them? Yes.
Building a website should not be a resume talking point, nor does it have to strike a telling blow for 'free speech', whatever that even means in a world where the rich and powerful are obeying in advance.
> Your standalone web site is like a cactus in the middle of a vast desert nobody cares about
Yet, cacti thrive in the desert, uncaring about the opinions of others.
> in fact now at a mercy of Google's indexing policies.
Inherently, the Web doesn't carry "maximizing an audience" as a maxim. That's an expectation that the Web's denizens have come to believe in as a matter of principle: the only valuable reason to put anything online, is because you intend to cater to an audience.
That doesn't exclude owning a personal website that you'd just peruse for your own sake. In fact, the author writes as much:
> You can write at length, ramble nonsensically, and people can choose to read it or not. It’s about putting things out on the internet for yourself.
Like, sure, there are platforms where you could share cooking recipes. But maybe that's not something you want for yourself, for whatever reason, maybe you don't want to attract undue attention, and you just want to keep them in your own quiet corner of the Web, for yourself.
You might want to write for the sake of the craft of writing, and use the Web as your medium, rather then paper. Others happening to stumble on your work, is just a by-product of your choice to publish thoughts on the Web.
Maybe you don't care about search engines, and if you need someone to find your work, well, you can just hand them an URL.
From your perspective, all of that may sound horribly inefficient, and that's true, it is inefficient and not the right way to do things if your express goal were to cater to large audiences. But that doesn't make it any less valid an option to approach the Web.
> There is no bottom line here. It's all about economy and capitalism, which seem to always win.
Well, my argument is that the Web, such as it was, experienced an Eternal September with the advent of social media and mobile devices. Suddenly, everyone could reach an audience with nothing but a smartphone. And that notion caused millions, billions, flocking to those few central platforms that catered to this apparent want, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Whereas, do you thoughts and intentions really need to be shown in front of an audience of billions, just because that's possible now? Of course not.
Wanting to be like a cactus is perfectly valid, giving your thoughts a quiet spot in some corner of the Web you can call your own, not having to worry about likes, favorites, comments, shares or clicks. As long as doing so caters to your own intentions.
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People who host their own websites are becoming like vegans in that they won't STFU about it. Having your own website is not a substitute for having a personality.
I’m rediscovering the personal web myself but I do agree we shouldn’t be obnoxious about it.
My thinking is people get nostalgic about the old times and excited about counteracting the Big Tech Corp forces.