My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this.
Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there.
If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google might like it and return it. But chances are, it won't thanks to SEO. And even if you do, you don't have any replies. A voice shouting into a void, signifying nothing. At that point, you need a blogging engine that allows for replies, and now you're in the world of off-the-shelf solutions. Not so far from Facebook or MySpace, which gets you your audience.
With a personal website, everything does become harder, but it ends up being your space and only your space. We've become accustomed to going viral and now no one can settle for having 50 consistent readers because that just seems so insignificant.
Are you potentially speaking for a vocal minority here that wants to be part of a conversation while ignoring the many than simply read (consume)?
I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed out enough that there is finally showing some pushback against it, many asking if the convenience or access to audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for it.
That said the demographics of most things are ballpark <10% produce content, <20% interact with content or comment and the rest >70% just consume content, and this seems to be roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers or Bloggers about it)
No, most of them don't:
> the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
Adding a heart reaction to an Instagram post is much easier than creating that Instagram post, though Instagram has made this very easy to do as well, which is easier still than creating a YouTube video, which is easier than updating a web page on SquareSpace.
I think this is why Reddit is mostly lurkers.
99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.
browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on.
that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it!
sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.
The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses.
alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)
Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps this would be more reflected in the general trends. Even now, you can't stem the tide of silly, interesting, creative things people post in these narrow, controlled channels.
I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among any sub-population from a starting population so large), but OP is clearly implying that there are a great deal more consumers than creators out there.
Stats support this, like 97% of tweets coming from only 25% of tweeters: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
Personally I hate it. But that's where all the creators are.
What is remarkable is that despite trying to wall the garden, the personal website is still a thing.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.
Maybe the era of shifting print, TV and radio to the internet is reaching saturation. You can view the internet as a content distribution system, but that ignores the key difference between internet and broadcast media: it is a two-way communication media.
> My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice.
There were plenty of choices. The big innovation was the social network that allowed people to connect with friends, family, and people with common interests. Now you could write something, take a picture, make a video, whatever, and share it with people who would start communicating with you and form communities around those interests.
> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
Most people now communicate via the internet about those non-computer-y interests.
I wish there was deep profound social, economic, or behavioral issues at play, but there aren’t. Some people want to build things and others just want to shout into a void or stare at those who do.
Is it what they want, or is that only what the market is willing to give them that's profitable? And how much of it is the result of manufactured consent?
Even though I'm in tech in silicon valley, all the personal websites I maintain are related to non-tech hobbies.
Consumption is important, but so is culture. Interaction is a big deal to many people. Look at the dynamics related to notifications, for example. People check in, desire the feedback, that interaction, and they seek more of it, form connections around it, and more.
> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se. The best ones were often about some other interest or perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago, if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a better audience through sharing that same perspective on social media.
I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was always the case) but that people creating content are in a numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and publishing stuff online has been mashed together with status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.
And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to host your content. Do you want to track how people use your site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and are not responsible for handling that user data.
If you're slightly technical that should be $1/year for hosting + $10 for domain name registration.
I don't know what the best way is now, but a few years ago I set up an s3 bucket that where I basically got charged nothing because the site was < 10mb, and I had that behind cloudflare's cdn which doesn't charge for bandwith. S3 lets you serve static files if the bucket name is the same as the domain name - so no webserver or anything needed.
I am pretty sure for a very small static site there's probably a handful of options that are basically free. One of gitpages, cloudflare pages, I think have free bandwith, not sure about vercel, or netlify.
I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your own. Good luck!
I used to use nearlyfreespeech.net for my own site and it was even cheaper, but a little more complicated to get up and running.
Estimate $3/month w/o the custom domain.
I maintain several google sites for my job, dont know why I didn't think of this route!
https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting
You would add your CMS of choice (Wordpress running on the shared server or rsync up a local set of static files)
I'm assuming companies like this must be ten a penny in USA.
But if you're okay with a git style flow, then you can use Cloudflare Pages. That's what I use. It's free and fast. But it's not spouse-friendly.
When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources.
I have been making website and pages since 1998, and have never done it another way.
It's been working well so far, although I did run into that issue of having more than 30 posts, so the oldest ones have already fallen off. Oops!
Not seeing Brian Lovin’s name in the LICENSE file in Nym either...
https://github.com/Nym-HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
Do you want people to set up personal websites?
The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230.
Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own, or they will be sued into oblivion.
Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that website.
Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as censorship.
A civil society can only prevail where people are required to take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public spaces.
At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases. When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers remind them of the Streisand effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and slander.
To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.
Also: Repeal Section 230? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea... it's a great way to ensure that the only speech that is permitted is Corporate speech, not Your speech. Thanks, but no thanks.
The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms can provide, so most people that would have a personal blog just aren't.
I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be disappointed with "engagement."
A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech, it needs a mindset reset.
I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics of programming and data science than it did to get so proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7 year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that means you can too with just a little bit of patience. Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.
I have a friend who's quite technically savvy and has been on the net since the early '90s. He used to maintain a website but once social media came along, he was gone with the wind. I asked him recently if he ever wanted to go back to posting on a personal blog and he said no, he found the minutiae in writing content, hosting, maintaining, etc to be boring and a waste of time even if he was only spending 10 min a week on it, given that he was mostly just interested in interacting in small comment-like bursts on online forums. For chatting with known friends, he's in group chats and Discords. He just doesn't find the value on having a personal website. I suspect most people don't either.
The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of typical mind share and opportunity.
The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good. Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior, preferring instead to give the author the least resistance possible to publishing.
So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.
Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology industry with more money than the median worker), you should offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even bother with platforms like twitter at all.
Opera has a lot of cool features, BTW! In the first 30 minutes I'm much more impressed than I expected. Kind of incredible you can get such great software for free (if not open source). Of course, that probably counts as a red flag in some rational threat-models...
Or, RSS will continue as an important technology, but one that's sidestepped in favour of social networks.
I miss the old web, blogging, deep knowledge and intellectually diverse voices spread and hosted widely. But it stands in contrast to the centralising, oligopolistic tendencies of capitalism, and arguably high technology itself.
Technology is so circular, old becomes new, over and over again.
"Join our network!" at the end reminded me of them.
Same with craft brewing, or scratch bakeries, etc.
Technically it might be "advertising your competition", but in a different light, it's trying to expand the amount of time and $$$ that the target customer group is spending in _any_ of the specialty / niche areas.
1. Keeping a public list of soon/current/recent projects forces me to keep priorities straight over long stretches of time.
2. Maintaining a monthly newsletter organizes my life into personal "sprints". It also provides a tiny community of like-minded people.
3. Essays supercharge reflections on deep questions. If you have any big ideas or strong opinions, public writing is incredible distillation.
4. Writing for fun is fun! It's a productive craft well-suited to curious/obsessive minds (much like programming).
---
This is my idea of the personal web.
`<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS feed" href="undefined/writing/rss">`
But still the independent websites continue to run and stay alive. Some of them have quality content too and appear on HN many times.
Is there a community/forum/channel of these independent website owners somewhere? Would love to hang out there.
Okay.. so someone copied Brian Lovin's blog platform and is proud of themselves.
I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.
Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the difference between a high street in a small city, full of different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places, but those were much easier to avoid).
I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter, Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out" goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).
The fun of late-90s website-making is real though, but I don't see a turn towards that for the vast majority of people.
One nice corner of optimism is projects like Glitch [1], which give just enough space to explore, go wild, and quickly host what you make.
[1]: https://glitch.com
Are there plans for ActivityPub integration?
