In recent days there has been a surge of new people on Bluesky, driven by another round of changes on Twitter. It’s great to see so many fresh faces and old ones I’d been following in the Before Times.
But there is a common complaint I’ve been seeing. People are rightfully unhappy with the prospect of having to build up an audience all over again—especially when they depend on their audience for income.
It makes me thankful to have my own little site here. I don’t have to worry about the latest changes in the algorithm or terms of service because it’s mine from top to bottom.
It would be great if it was like that for everyone. If everyone had their own corner of the internet to do what they wanted with, to keep their art, their photos, their thoughts, their what ever in one place. It would be interesting to see what the internet would look like if that were the default and the role of social networks was more to serve as specialized search engines, connecting and collating websites according to the relationships between the people who own them, rather than by topic.
So I wish more people had their own sites. There are some corollaries to that. Of course that would require that more people had the skills to do it. And I wish that it did not require the amount of technical knowledge that, say, I used in creating and running this site. Because I don’t actually think it’s reasonable to just tell everyone to learn Linux and how to code or else go fuck themselves.
There are of course plenty of ways to get a website without building it from scratch and having to know about DNS, servers, etc. But the big platforms for that, like Wix or Squarespace are vulnerable to enshittification, and the small ones like neocites are vulnerable to shutting down and disappearing.
I don’t know how fundamental the tradeoff between having a lot of control over a thing—and accordingly needing to know more about how it works—and having an abstracted, “simple” presentation is. Some things really are complicated and there’s no getting around it.
Well, writing this took longer than I expected. It started as just a tweet on Bluesky, but then it seemed to me I could just expand it a little and get a blog post out of the idea. Except then I couldn’t figure out how to finish the things. I banged my head against it for days and rewrote it from scratch. The problem with writing longer form things is that it’s not enough just to have an idea. You actually have to think through what the idea is.