Your corner of the internet

Do you have one? I want to visit it.

I long for a world where I can connect with people directly on the internet.

I’m tired of our reality where the only convenient way to stay connected with friends and family is through advertising streams dressed up as social media feeds, or through chat clients built to farm your habits, interests, and relationships as data to be sold to companies.

I wish I could speak into the internet and know that my words are heard directly instead of through reverberations and echoes that have been recorded, parsed, replayed, ranked, and filtered before they reach the people I care about.

What I’m after

The older I get, the more I find myself wanting something simple: a sense of what’s happening in the lives of the people I care about. Most importantly, I want to gain that sense through a direct and authentic medium.

I have friends scattered all over. We have jobs, kids, responsibilities, projects, hobbies, and busy lives. Sometimes months go by before we have a chance to talk. I’d love to know what they’ve been up to in between those chances. I want to know what they’ve been building. What hobby has captured their attention lately. What project they’re excited about. What they’re learning.

Not because an algorithm surfaced it.

Because they’re my friends.

The obvious answer is “just text them!” - but it doesn’t solve the right problem.

Texting is a conversation. A blog post is an invitation.

When I text someone, I’m asking for their attention. I’m creating an obligation, however small, for them to read and respond.

When I post on social media, whether or not my friends see it is largely up to an algorithm.

When I publish a blog post, I’m simply making a piece of myself available to anyone who cares enough to look. Intentionally.

That’s the kind of connection I miss. The internet used to be much better at this.

What we have

The systems we originally built for this purpose have become something else.

What should be a direct connection between two people now passes through a machine built to monetize our relationships. Our thoughts and ideas become products. They’re sequenced and filtered in order to maximize engagement and generate profit. My words become a tool to manipulate my friends and strangers. The emotional impact of the things we write - no matter how small - becomes another input into a system designed to keep people scrolling, clicking, watching, and consuming.

The decisions that have led to this were not made by any one person.

They’re the result of algorithms and incentives that have been designed, curated, nudged, and refined to extract more money from us. To control the people using them. Not because someone set out to make the world worse, but because the systems that generate the most revenue tend to be the systems that capture the most attention.

I think a majority of the people who have helped build these platforms wanted to build experiences that were truly beneficial to their users. But the economic incentives driving these platforms rarely align with healthy human connection. It turns out that our brains are remarkably easy to exploit. It’s a shame that reinforcing healthy relationships and positive human connection isn’t quite as profitable as reinforcing outrage, envy, fear, and compulsion.

It’s not the Internet’s fault

The internet itself isn’t the problem.

I love the internet.

I love what it makes possible. I love the accessibility of information, the ability to communicate across the world instantly, the communities that form around shared interests, and the incredible tools and technologies that have emerged because of it.

But somewhere along the way, we stopped building systems that primarily connected people and started building systems that primarily monetized and manipulated them.

I have a romantic vision of what the web used to feel like.

Personal websites. Blogs. Weird little corners of the internet. Sites with terrible fonts, custom backgrounds, music that autoplayed, and layouts that made no sense. They were messy, but they were personal. You could learn something about a person before reading a single sentence.

The web felt less like a feed and more like an adventure.

You found interesting websites because someone linked you to them. You followed rabbit holes. You bookmarked things. You shared them with friends. Discovery happened through people.

Today, discovery mostly happens through algorithms. Instead of exploring ideas, we’re served content. Instead of wandering, our paths are optimized. Instead of finding interesting things through human relationships, we find them through endless scrolling, hoping that the next swipe will finally reveal that last “good video” before you close the app.

I don’t think that’s a better internet.

What can we do

Ultimately, I think the healthiest way to avoid the algorithm is through direct access. What’s the simplest way to do that?

Hosting your own website.

Put your projects, thoughts, updates, photos, essays, and hobbies there. Let it reflect who you are.

Then bookmark your friends’ websites. Visit them intentionally.

Read what they’ve been up to. See what they’re building. Learn what they’re excited about this month. Follow links they find interesting. Discover new ideas through people you trust instead of through systems designed to maximize engagement.

Personal websites aren’t as convenient as social media. They require more effort. They require intent. But that’s part of the appeal. The important thing is that the mechanisms are transparent. They’re understandable. They’re auditable. They’re not black boxes making decisions on our behalf.

If I choose to visit a friend’s website, that’s my choice. If I intentionally spend an evening catching up on what they’ve been working on, reading about a new hobby they’ve picked up, seeing photos from a recent trip, or learning about something they’ve become passionate about, that’s a direct relationship.

No black-box algorithm decided it was time for me to see them. No recommendation engine boosted their content because it would increase engagement.

I explored their content because of one core reason: I thought about them.

That’s a fundamentally different experience than following people, “liking” posts, and endlessly scrolling through our modern social media feeds hoping the algorithm serves you well.

This isn’t a novel idea

This isn’t some new realization. Most of us have felt some version of this for years.

To me, what’s changed is that it’s becoming harder to ignore.

The incentives are more visible. The consequences are more obvious. The tradeoffs are no longer hidden behind the novelty of the technology.

Hosting your own website won’t fix the internet. It won’t solve every problem with social media, advertising, surveillance, or propaganda.

But it does restore something valuable.

Ownership. Intentionality. Transparency.

I want an internet where I can keep up with my friends because I choose to. An internet built from connections, curiosity, and real communication. An internet where discovery comes from people instead of algorithms. An internet where I can visit a friend’s little corner of the web and grow more connected to them.

Not because a feed told me to.

Because I chose to.

Addendum

I consider this blog post over, any more and it muddles the point.

That said… there are a few topics that I wanted to fit in - but they all felt forced, scattered, and out of place. So I thought I’d list them off below.

I would love to hear your own opinions and thoughts. I want to hear about the problems I might be overstating or the solutions I might be propping up a little too high.

I’m not advocating that everyone delete their social media accounts and retreat into a network of independent blogs.

Social media has created genuine value.

It helps people find communities they otherwise never would have discovered. It helps minority groups connect across geographic boundaries. It helps information spread during emergencies, natural disasters, political movements, and world events. It has allowed families and friends to stay connected across enormous distances.

There is a tremendous amount of good that can come from these platforms.

My criticism isn’t that social media exists. It’s that the default incentives behind many modern platforms have drifted away from helping people connect and toward maximizing monetization and control.

Personal websites aren’t a replacement. They’re a supplement. A counterbalance. A way to reclaim a small amount of ownership and intentionality over how we communicate online.

Even if only a fraction of our interactions happen through spaces we truly control, I think that’s a healthier internet than one where every relationship is mediated by a feed.

And if nothing else, I’d love to know what my friends are working on without having to hope an algorithm decides it’s important enough for me to see.

You don’t need to be a technologist

It’s easy to read this post and imagine some tech bro building their home lab and writing their website from scratch.

That’s not what I’m advocating. The point isn’t self-hosting.

The point is ownership.

A personal website can be a Squarespace page. It can be a Tumblr blog. It can be a simple site hosted on a free service. It can be anything that gives you a place on the internet that feels like yours, that can be accessed directly, and freely.

If you can create a Facebook profile, you can create a personal website.

The bigger challenge isn’t technical. It’s creative. If you have a personal space on the internet, you might feel an obligation to write an A-tier blog post at least every 5 business days. But that expectation is not there. Write what matters to you, when it matters. Don’t stress.

And honestly, I understand why that’s intimidating.

Writing about your hobbies, documenting projects, sharing photos, expressing opinions, or talking about what you’re learning isn’t for everyone. Not everybody wants to create content, and not everybody should feel obligated to.

But for people who already have the desire to share - what they’re working on, what they’re learning, or what they’re excited about - I think personal websites remain one of the most powerful and underused mediums.

Privacy

Personal websites and blogs are public. That’s a real concern.

Not everyone wants to share details about their personal life with the entire internet. And to be clear, I’m not advocating that everyone become a public billboard.

But I do think it’s worth examining the privacy model we’ve become comfortable with.

Today, many of us are willing to share enormous amounts of information with a handful of large companies. We hand over our interests, relationships, habits, locations, browsing history, and social circles. We trust that the data is anonymized, aggregated, or handled responsibly. Yet those companies often possess enough information to know exactly who we are.

The privacy isn’t really from the platform.

The privacy is from each other.

That’s a strange tradeoff when you think about it. The corporations know everything, but the people we’re actually trying to connect with know almost nothing.

That said, I understand why. There are legitimate reasons to be cautious online. Harassment, stalking, doxxing, and other forms of abuse are real concerns. Anonymity exists for important reasons.

The challenge is finding a middle ground.

I don’t have a perfect answer here, and everyone’s balance will be different. I simply think we’ve accepted a model where the only entities guaranteed to know who we are are the corporations sitting between us.

And that feels backwards.

Authentication and Federation

On the topic of Privacy… Part of what makes social media appealing is that you can control who sees your content. You add friends. You create private groups. You share things with people you know and trust.

Personal websites don’t naturally solve that problem.

Interestingly, some of the more recent movements on the internet have been exploring exactly this space. Projects like Mastodon, Bluesky, and other federated platforms are attempting to solve pieces of the puzzle: identity, ownership, authentication, and content distribution without relying entirely on a single centralized company.

I’m still learning about many of these technologies, but I find the direction encouraging.

In theory, a federated identity could allow you to host your own content while still controlling who can access it. You could maintain ownership of your space while preserving some of the comfort and safety that comes from sharing only with people you trust, without relying on a centralized identity platform.

But I don’t know if these systems are the answer yet. Very few of my friends are participating in any of these platforms and gating content behind one of them would ostracize them. For now, I still think a public, personal website is the easiest method to share your content. Maybe if one of these options become more widespread and as ubiquitous as other social platforms, it will be an obvious solution.

What I do know is that they are at least trying to solve the right problem: how do we maintain authentic connections online without handing complete control of those relationships to a handful of companies?

The future probably isn’t “everyone hosts a blog and manually emails the URL to their friends.”

The future is likely some combination of personal ownership, open standards, federation, and tools that make discovery and authentication easier without turning them into advertising products.

The void

There is one more thing that feels worth mentioning.

I think a natural fear of posting anything online is the possibility that nobody will care.

Nobody will read it. Nobody will respond. Nobody will even know it exists.

Whether you spend thirty seconds writing a post or thirty days writing one, the chance of it being seen is never guaranteed.

I have that fear with this very post.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these ideas. I’ve argued with myself about them. I’ve written and rewritten sections of this blog post more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve spent literal hours talking out loud to myself, recording my thoughts, reading them back, and trying to figure out what I actually believe.

If nobody reads this, I can’t really be mad.

Over time, I’ve come to treat much of what I publish online more like a diary than a performance. It’s a record of what I was thinking, what I was building, what I cared about, and who I was at a particular moment in my life.

Years from now, I’ll be able to look back on it and remember where I came from.

And if someone else finds value in it - if it makes them think, helps them understand me better, or simply makes them feel a little more connected to me - that’s an amazing side effect.

If your only reason for sharing something online is for other people to listen, I understand the hesitation. The internet can feel like shouting into a void.

But I’ve found that the act of creating has value on its own.

Writing forces me to organize my thoughts. It helps me understand what I actually believe. It gives me something to revisit years later. For me, that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

That said, part of this entire argument is an attempt to encourage more people to occupy that same space. The more people who share their thoughts, projects, hobbies, photos, and experiences through places they control, the more valuable those places become.

Maybe this post becomes part of that.

Maybe it doesn’t.

But if it inspires you to start posting somewhere on the internet in the future, let me know.

I’ll bookmark it.