blog/content/yukijoou/make-a-website/index.md

title	authors	date	description
own your place on the web!	yukijoou	2023-09-03	...or why you shouldn't create content for social networks in 2023

hi, welcome! you've just arrived on my piece of the internet. you're reading this article from my own website.¹ i have full control over every bit of this page. i can change the background to a picture of my cat, or make the layout completely different, or use bad words and insults if i want to.
if you've arrived here, it's likely not because of google's search results -- unlike most companies these days, i'm not using any tricks to rank higher in search results or buy ads, and so i'm probably not easily findable through that. i also don't tend to talk about trendy topics, or bring any value to google, as that's not my goal...

see, i'm just making things on the internet because i enjoy it! because i think some of my friends may find it interesting, because i want to try something out, or just because i like writing or making software for the fun of it. i don't think it's worth the time or effort to be popular, or to play the google rankings game, it'd just make it harder for me to do the silly things i enjoy.

and i'm not alone! the "indie web", or, as i like to call it, the "people's web", is a bunch of independent websites, just like mine, made by people, for people, with the main goal of sharing something with the world, or just putting ideas out there. we're not in it for the money or the fame: most of us hide behind usernames and avoid sharing as much personal information as possible because we just want to make fun or share interesting things!

we want to share the cute cat we saw on the way home, the program we made that helps us study, or even how we block ads on websites and watch pirated copies of movies, because we think it'll help out other people, or because we think they may enjoy it. some of those things may not be liked by advertisers, and that's one of the reasons why we don't want to use big platforms like instagram or others. we don't want them telling us what's "safe" or not.

we don't like ads on websites, so we don't use them. we don't like corporate/uniform designs, so we try to be creative. we don't care about having billions of views and interractions, so most of us don't even track that. and most importantly, we want people to enjoy our stuff. not algorithms, not ai chat-bots, not search engines. we don't care about those.

the problem with the state of "the internet"

if you ask your parents what the internet is, they will likely answer that it's "basically facebook" (or something similar), and possibly "emails" if they use that. which makes sense -- when you think of internet content nowadays, most people think of massive social network that make content creation and sharing super easy.
in a way, it's really wonderful that anyone can share their opinion and say what they want! thanks to the algorithms they have, finding people's stuff you like is easy, and everything is centralised on less than a dozen platforms.

and that's the problem. all that content is pretty much owned and distributed by a dozen massive platforms. if one of them goes down (and one day they all will), it's millions, if not hundreads of millions of people's content that gets deleted in an instant. this also means it's up to the platform to decide what's allowed and not allowed: if an employee in the right department of that company doesn't like you, they can shut off your account in minutes, and you have no recourse.

the content creation process may be "easy", at least in comparaison to not using those massive services, but it does restrict you to the platform's rules, which often encourage you to make things that make advertisers happy, and allow the platform to make as much money from its users as it can. these things often don't align with what people want! most people are growing tired of recommendation algorithms, people and companies keep finding ways of getting around it, and instead of your recommendations being full of things you care about, it's mostly just popular stuff, or things specifically made to make the algorithm happy.

making the content creation process as easy as possible also means killing a good bit of creativity. when making a twitter post, you can write some 280 characters in the box and share those with the world. no more, no less. no formatting, no emphasis or bold text. some websites may give you more options, but none will allow you to write your own code in the middle of your blog post to draw a rainbow:

Click and drag in the window below to draw a rainbow!

your browser unfortunately doesn't support canvas, no funny rainbows for you :c

on popular social networks, if you want to do anything more creative than bare text , you have to use an image or a video, which comes with its own set of problems². youtube had fancy channel customisation options³ at some point, but it got removed in the name of uniformity and ease of use. now, every channel looks the same except for a custom logo and banner, and i think that's a bit sad :(
i've seen amazing personal websites with crazy designs, and on small social networks like SpaceHey, where people have the tools to customise their profile page, you get amazingly unique things!

and that's mostly why i think personnal websites are better: you can truly express yourself, you're not at the mercy of some algorithms to know if your content will be deleted, and you're not helping some company grow their market share and increase their proffit margins⁴. you're always in control of your content, you can make backups and repost it wherever you want super easily, and can, for example, at any point, stop openai from using your content in chatgpt.

though, many people think the major platform's compromises are worth it for the ease of use social networks have. to which i have to answer:

making a website isn't hard!

of course, this is subjective, but making a website isn't a difficult skill to learn, and will serve you greatly for anything related to the internet! there are many tools available to make it even easier, and even more tutorials (i'm also currently working on a guide to help you get started)!
it's not expensive either, and (depending on what you want to do, of course), you likely can put something up on the internet for free (or really cheap) right now (as long as you have a computer).

and even if you can't put anything on the internet right now, you don't have to: you can store all the files that make up your website on your computer, and make your website accessible to anyone on your home internet connection for free within minutes. it's a very good way to prototype things and just play around with making internet content without any consequenses!

while you may have to rely on some companies to make it work (like, an internet service provider, a host if you don't want all the traffic from your website to go through your home internet, and most likely a registrar to get a name for your website), you have the option to switch to any other company providing the same service at any point! you can always copy all your files to somewhere else if you want to.

all in all, the whole infrastructure i'm running for my friends and i costs me about 15€/month, plus a few hours of maintance a month, for a blog, personal websites for each of us, a social network, and an image sharing service -- it's cheaper than a premium netflix subscription!

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so, if you have some time to spare, and want to start sharing content with the world, i recommend making a website! even if it's just for reposting stuff you're sharing elsewhere, it gives you a space that's truly yours, and that you can keep as long as you're alive, and maybe more. it'll teach you general computer and system administration skills, that'll always be usefull in life.
and most importantly, it'll let you express yourself however you like, share the things you care about with friends, and make something for people.

i'll note though that if you want to build a massive community, a website probably isn't the way to go. but i'd say, you don't need a massive community! people looking at your website are often much more engaged and interested in what you're sharing than people scrolling though hundreads of posts, so you'll likely get as many interractions, if not more, from actual humans!

if you want to get started right now, i recommend you check out mozilla's "Getting started with the web" guide, and if you're looking for tools to make your life easier, i made a dead simple site generator you might want to check out.

if you want to see some content made by indie web people, you can check those out:

• rampancy.neocities.org, including this beutiful digital shrine to the video game SIGNALIS (cw: no reduced motion support on both links)
• possums.gay, another yuki's website (cw: gifs with slight motion on the main page, quite high contrast)
• nano.lgbt (cw: gifs with slight motion, high contrast)
• maia.crimew.gay (cw: gifs with slight motion)
• sugary.kemonomimi.gay (cw: gifs with slight motion)
• and of course, my own website

you should also check out reclaim hosting, a company providing super cheap hosting (less than 4$/month) and domains for your website.

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1. well, not really "my own", it's my group of friends' website that i am managing. ↩︎

2. images are not readable by screenreaders used by blind people, and take much more data than text to transmit. blind people make up a good part of internet users, and metered connections are still definitely a thing in many places. ↩︎

3. see smosh's channel in 2009 on the internet archive, i was not on youtube back then, so i don't have many examples, but i'm sure some people managed to do some way more advanced things! ↩︎

4. yes. i know, you will have to rely on some companies when running a website, and they definitely make money from you. but i'll touch on more how that works later, and i think it's still a much more honest and transparent business model than most social media companies. ↩︎