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Make Your Own Website

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Dec 11, 2024.

  1. Melody Bot Dec 11, 2024
    Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    Gita Jackson, writing on Aftermath:

    Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

    I didn’t realize how important that was until I started my own website, and I didn’t even learn it from helping to run the damn thing. When I meet people at events, they tell me that they’ve set Aftermath as their homepage. People tell me they love interacting with other people in the comments. They tell me it’s one on a small list of websites, not social media, that they check in on every day. People, it seems, actually like going to a website, and they like that we made one.

    This entire article speaks to me.

    I’ve recently seen similar sentiments from others, like Louis Manta:

    In the last 15 years, many people (myself included) were drawn to third-party solutions for presenting ourselves. For our résumés, LinkedIn. For portfolios, Behance and Dribbble. For blogging, Tumblr, Medium, and Substack. Instead of forums, Discord and Slack. But despite each of these advertising some amount of autonomy, in reality you have very little.

    By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you. In addition, a peer or competitor might appear next to you. It may not be great for you to have your competitor one click away from your own profile.

    As I’ve pulled (way) back from social media over the past few years, I’ve found having a place for my writing, that I control, own, and can present how I want even more appealing.

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  2. slickdtc Dec 11, 2024
    slickdtc

    Regular Supporter

    Seems to me the rubberband effect will eventually take charge, where at first social media sites promised a centralized, clean place to present yourself. Then once everyone flocked there, it slowly eroded everything it claimed at first as they capitalized on the volume of users. Honestly, this was always the goal of SM sites — bleed money for years acquiring users, then turn them in to moneymakers. But people understand this more now then they did as those sites were building up their users.

    Now we’re in the phase where we see those places as having run their course as far as the original promises and offerings. The trial is over. SM is a void. Everyone is there, but no one is really listening. It’s a tool to get to an audience, but the audience isn’t engaged because you’re in a sea of everything else.

    So now we might get a renaissance of website creation and unique places that we so desperately wanted to consolidate in the past. People seem to understanding that if you want easy, clean across the board you will be sacrificing a lot of what makes the whole thing worth it in the first place! I’m old enough to remember and used FreeWebs, GeoCities, etc as mentioned in the article and blurb there. But anyone under 30 probably mostly goes to their socials. People don’t even understand that you’re on the internet when you’re on your Facebook app, lol. So I will love it when the younger generations get fed up and start creating their own websites — a first for them. It’ll be totally new and unique for them, and they’ll be generational rifts… but in the end it will be a positive thing.

    No one calls Facebook their Internet home. But I’ve felt at home on a few different websites over the last 20-25 years, some continuing to this day and some having run their course. Not every website, like a business, is meant to operate forever. I just hope we can preserve some of these relics. Nostalgia for the old heads who remember and inspiration for future generations.
     
    orangehorizon, Crisp X and artbynickferran like this.