Welcome to the future (it’s like the past, but right now)
Ever hear of the dead internet theory? Long story short, many of the largest social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. have more bot users and generative AI posts than actual human users. The internet used to be a magical place to explore things that you may have never found otherwise. Over the past 5 to 10 years, this has changed, and the internet has mostly become the same ten websites over and over and over, every day. All of the content on those websites is hyper-optimized to fit that site’s algorithm. It feels like the magic that was there was sucked out and replaced with bureaucracy. I’m sick of it, so here I am.
I haven’t had a blog since I was a kid, and at that point I didn’t know what to do with it. Even at that point, I had my own domain, and it was hosted on its own website. Now, in addition to dumping my thoughts (like I am doing now) it is the perfect platform to talk about my creative and personal projects. There are a lot of cases that I’d want to make a “Just Talking” video and put it on YouTube, but that’s not always a fantastic idea. Not only is it much harder to put together a whole video, but it messes with the algorithm. Here, there is no algorithm. This is my domain, literally.
Indie is how the internet will survive
Everyone hates social media. Sometimes it’s love-hate, but I don’t know anyone who absolutely loves visiting Twitter or Facebook at all times. I am not smart enough in psychology to know what it does to people’s brains, but I am smart enough in computers to say that it’s absurd that people don’t make their own websites more often.
This website is made in Hugo and hosted through Gitlab and Cloudflare Pages. Of course, that’s a more advanced way of setting up a website, but it’s much simpler than many of the other options out there. Not to mention free (for the most part). Domains cost around $10 to $15 per year, and setting up a host for the website itself is a YouTube video away. If you are willing to pay a host, Wordpress is the software I recommend. I’ve used it for ages and it’s great for blogs and static pages. Though it is a huge pain to host yourself if you don’t have a computer you’re willing to dedicate to the site.
Why bother creating an indie site?
Most people probably don’t need a whole website to themselves. But those who are like me and are tired of the rat race of the big social media sites should look into it. If you need somewhere to post your thoughts, this is one of the better options.
Are you an artist? Get off deviantArt and start a website. That goes for any creative types. Writers, voice actors, photographers, developers. A dedicated website is a huge part of having a great portfolio.
Or just do it for fun, I don’t blame you.
Social media doesn’t deserve to go away
If social media goes away, what’s left is a vacuum. Eventually something will make its way to fill that spot. Indie sites and blogs can’t do that, because something has to exist to facilitate discovery. Recommendation algorithms are terrible as a user, but as a creator, they’re your best friend. The internet is much like a library, but what separates them is that you cannot go on the internet and peruse its shelves until you find a site that looks interesting enough to visit. The internet as a whole is not curated and organized like a library.
Recommendation algorithms on social media platforms offer a solution to that problem. They’re not a perfect solution, but they do their best at letting people discover new content. Other than word-of-mouth and discovering links to other sites, I cannot fathom how people used to find websites before Google existed.
Let’s talk about Google
What happened to Google search? Genuine question. When did it suddenly become unbelievably difficult to find what you are looking for? It had to have happened gradually, because I can’t think of a moment when it was suddenly worse than it was the day before (other when they decided to downgrade their logo).
Google is not a good tool for website discovery. It hasn’t been for most of its lifetime. Unless you go out of your way to search for something new, as in, something that you haven’t even considered searching before, you would be hard-pressed to find any new websites.
I don’t know how I’ll get new people to find this site. It will either be through word of mouth or more likely, links posted on other websites. Probably not Google. I don’t have the search engine optimization skills to make that a reality.
Free for me, free for thee
I am not paying a cent to host this website (as of now) and I don’t expect to make a cent off of it. There will NEVER be advertisements or sponsored posts on this site, even for my own projects. If I have a project I want to share, I’m going to have something substantial to talk about.
If you are, however, deluded enough to want to pay for the content I’m making here, I will leave a link to my Ko-Fi page at the bottom of the site. I’m not putting a link in the article. Again, I don’t expect anyone to click on it, let alone send me money. This is probably the only time I’m going to mention it. It will just live on the bottom of the site.
If you do want to keep up to date, however, you can add this site to your favorite RSS reader. I won’t be regularly posting links to these articles on anything else, so that’s going to be your best bet for seeing more articles from me. It’s just like the old days in the early 2000s. Blogs, RSS feeds, websites with no ads. It’ll be great.
And happy Cirno day!
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