Build your own website.
Build a bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX space online.
The platforms we are beholden to constrain, standardize, and gatekeep the creative soul. Their malpractice and dark patterns force us to accomodate to surveillance, growth incentives, and performative behaviors.
What lies beyond this... Or what lies before it?
The future is usually ancient.
In this case, only as ancient as the late 90's or early 00's.
Hobbyist website creation is accessible to the masses again. Free versions of LLMs bring vibe coding for small-scale personal projects. This site was a dream in the head of a reluctant Squarespace customer with no code experience. 2 months and a 25,000-line html file later, I have a adaptable, RSS-friendly, personal site for my writing.
Whether you shoot on film, write short stories, paint with oils, or record a podcast, your art, your practice needs a home. If you must engage the digital world, do it well.
Social media, extractive newsletter platforms, and monopolistic entities grow through network and entrench through lock-in effects. These leave no space for self-expression and true, empowering acts of the creative will.
Just for a minute, step back from the ladder we've been told to climb.
Who do each of these platforms serve?
Who truly owns the art produced on each?
Where will your work end up if these platforms go the way of Twitter or others in our hyper-changing digital landscape?
As one gardener of the indie web says,
"My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge.
What could yours be?"
I've been on a rabbit hole recently, so feel free to follow me down and explore similar posts and ideas from TCI, Figma, and many a listicle across the web's Ressourcement...