I am writing this post mainly for myself, to remind myself that the site is not useless, but also as a good introductory first post for anyone who may have stumbled across the site. for the sake of clarity and navigability, i will be breaking up this article into distinct subsections.
I think there is a tendency to feel like something on the internet has to justify its existence by being useful or popular or even making money. I do not really think a project such as this one needs to do any of that. If five people find it and think it is cool, that is fine. If nobody reads something I put here, I still wanted to make it and put it somewhere.
Because I wanted to
I only opened this site as of recent because it took me quite a bit of time to realise what i actually wanted from my personal site and what i wanted it to be.
Presuming that you are a person with a vision, ability, and taste, the bottleneck for any kind of knowledge work is increasingly no longer financial and interpersonal, neccesitating hiring and delegating work to a large team of specialists. Instead, the human computer is increasingly obsolete for all but the highest level and cutting edge of new work and research.
Personal/project websites are nothing new, but there has never been a better time to spin up a personal/project site if you are so inclined and you think you have the vision. Open-source software and generative AI are the most advanced they have ever been, and have dramatically lowered the barrier to learning and building things yourself. You no longer necessarily have to already know with exact detail how to do every part of something yourself. You need just enough understanding to know what you want, learn what you need along the way, and tell whether the thing you have made is actually any good.
Existing platforms are good, but not sufficient
Existing platforms are useful and I continue to use them. I actually love Instagram and X/Twitter (at least conceptually), but I am against algorithms that optimise for attention. Users are faced with the perverse incentive to be noticed by as many as possible, many of whom are fake bot accounts in the first place, and tend to play into the algorithm to be seen. I am guilty of this too. Even without the incentive of the poster, these places are hotbeds of endless novel content designed to drain your vril and entrap you in endless and infinitely entertaining bullshit.
To paraphrase: "Fuck yeah bro, For You page. Huge boobs, naked asshole, Chinese nigga car accidents flying through the windshield, penis sex, Ukraine nigga legs blown off, it's For You dawg it's lit"
The bread is chemically optimised to be more delicious than anything remotely possible in nature, and the circus is infinite so that many can never leave.
Ultimately, existing platforms just inherently have forms, incentives, and rules. sometimes they fit what I am trying to express, and sometimes they do not. I do not want to stifle my creativity by limiting what I can express according to whatever algorithmic rules are being enforced that day. I can always back up my site, i can buy a different domain, i can redirect, i can control it and own it. what do you do if you wake up banned from instagram?
Every platform mandates whatever you make to fit into its particular format. Instagram is great for images, but is increasingly oriented around vertical short-form video. X is good for short, immediate thoughts, and naturally encourages things that can be made short and immediate. Medium and Substack are much better suited to long-form writing, but writing is not the only way I want to express something. What if images or sound are integral to some piece of writing? What if it needs to be an interactive page, or some combination of text, images, music and video? I could split all of those things between five different services and link between them, but that is a totally stupid way to do things with massive friction. Here I can just make the thing in whatever form makes sense, with as little friction as possible for whoever is looking at it.
Obviously, owning a website does not mean achieving some kind of total independence from the rest of the internet. I still need domain registrars, hosting, search engines, browsers, infrastructure, and probably still need social platforms for people to discover the site in the first place. I do not think there is any serious way of escaping centralisation completely. This is just about as close as I can reasonably get to having a place on the internet whose rules and presentation I decide for myself.
What is this place, then?
This is where i show off stuff i think is cool. I have a radio station (not yet live), a page for livestreams, and i am considering future extensions of the site. a guestbook, a segment highlighting other sites i think are cool, a minecraft server, an ssh-accessible version of the site, a "museum" (for lack of a better word), etc? I do not know, and I am still figuring it out.
I do not particularly want to decide in advance what all of this eventually adds up to. I think coherence emerges rather than being planned. At the most basic level, this is somewhere for me to put things I make, things I think, and things I think are cool, in whatever form seems appropriate.
If you have come across this site, and you like what you see, great! keep an eye on it in coming days and weeks. browse it, listen to the radio, sign the guestbook, etc! if you have come across this site and think it sucks, you should look at any of the ten billion other things on the internet.