You've endorsed the article writer's lament as well. The decline of personal sites is worrisome and everyone getting silo'ed into megacorps is not a healthy alternative. Even if most social media users are okay with it, the same way that most humans are okay with increasing the use of fossil fuels or forest products. The average of humanity is unable to see beyond a short-range horizon, and in this case the tech community has failed to present attractive alternatives that might have helped slow the onslaught of corporate Internet takeover, even though stuff like Krita prove the community is capable, if only there was sufficient motivation and organisation. But somehow this area has languished.

The web used to have parity between creation of content and consumption when desktop access was the way the world surfed the web. Since smartphones took over, the web has been about consumption of media, requiring most contribution to be through apps. What sadist would edit HTML on a phone?

Maybe of HTML but certainly not of content in general. People post Instagrams, TikToks, Tweets, Youtube videos, Unity Games, etc... I'd argue content creation is up, way up. It's possible just not content that personally interests you (or me)

>I'd argue content creation is up, way up

I think there's even an argument. During the heyday of the "Read/write Web"/Web 2.0 which was supposedly in part about the mainstreaming of content creation, the reality was that relatively few people had blogs etc. (and there were far fewer podcasts in the first wave than today).

Is there less long-form thoughtful writing and personal websites today? Possibly. Certainly it's a much smaller part of the overall mix. But there's more content (both quality and otherwise) than ever.

I don't know if I agree... Ok, UI creation has gone down, but never the web had so much user created content. From tweets to videos and long texts it's easier to create content on mobile and in a much bigger volume than ever it was created.

"The medium is the message." The possible shapes of a river are determined by the underlying landscape.

And sometimes rivers over flow and change the landscape, what's your point? The medium and message interact together and have pros and cons to different methodologies. Is painting a bad art form because the canvas is too restrictive to convey a message?

Vines and later TikToks are examples of creative mediums which are almost exclusively made on phones

There are things like onuniverse, which has given interesting grid-like constraints to users to avoid html on phones

https://onuniverse.com/

I think there's some rose colored glasses here about the "good ole days" where everyone had a personal site. In 1999 almost everyone's so called "personal site" was hosted by either Yahoo (Geocities) or Lycos (Angelfire/Tripod).

In fact most ISPs offered free web hosting and an email account, with optional domain naming, as part of their deal.

Geocities and Tripod were prominent but they were a long way from being the only option.

And the hosting usually allowed CGI and PHP and often included shopping carts and other ready-made services. So it was ridiculously easy and cheap to set up a small business if you wanted to - or just create some basic pages if you didn't.

Is there a decline in absolute numbers of personal sites? Or is there a relative increase in people posting stuff on non-personal sites? I suspect the latter as it’s easier than it’s ever been to have a personal site.

Easy for us. I can spin up a create react app, one of those minimalist CSS frameworks, netlify and I have a site in about 15 minutes.

But take the average joe that doesn't know about these tools, they don't know about netlify, CSS or HTML for that matter. For them it's a whole lot easier to create an account.

You just repeated my point.

Look, if 25 years ago 100k people had personal website and today 3m people have personal website and also 3 billion have social media accounts, are we worse off than we were then? The personal website concept isn’t dying. It’s just that it’s no longer the only kind of web presence an individual can have and others are more popular.

Also, are you really looking out for the average Joe here? Really? You think that same average Joe that’s currently reposting a two year old meme on his Facebook suddenly will have something worthwhile to say if it’s hosted on his own domain? You think crazy aunt Sue will go from screaming about chem trails to engaging in polite discourse just because she got off Twitter and registered a domain? You think uncle Buddy will do anything but make the background, logo, and font of his site based on the confederate flag because he can host it on BuddyMerican.com instead of on Facebook?

I believe we should all have the ability to have a website of our own with as little control lost as possible. And I believe just like it’s a lot easier today than it was 25 years to have a personal website, that it will be even easier 25 years from now. But when people reminisce about the good old days what they like is essentially that it was hard to have a personal website so only the smart people could do it. That isn’t to say that only smart people had websites, but that websites were primarily run by smart people and that was because you couldn’t buy one, you had to build it yourself. And that meant that when you found a personal website that it was likely of high quality. Is that how you feel today when you discover a random abandoned mom blog about how hard it is to decide between different types of formula?

What Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, et al did was that they made it super easy for the average Joe to have a pseudo-personal website. It’s your moniker on their platform, you generate content, they host it and make money. And people wanted it by the billions. But at the end of the day do you really believe that all their content would be better if they simply moved from one kind of public platform to another?

But it's still easier than it has ever been to create their own website. There are video tutorials with step by step instructions. People just don't want to. Which is okay, people are free to allocate their time to different interests.

I agree. Months (or years ago), when influencers started to populate the internet, I often asked myself "What's their website?" after visiting their Instagram/Twitter/YouTube profile. The truth is, they don't need a website anymore.

I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.

There's good and bad in this.

It sucks that we depend on Facebook/Instagram and others to get information about a local business like a restaurant we want to visit.

But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there? If they even had a website it was built by the owner's nephew or maybe used some wix template, then if it does exist you're going all over the place to find contact information, opening hours are probably missing, menu might be anything from another page to a download of a photographed PDF.

I like the fact that I can go to a social network profile and there's a big button with contact information in the same place for all businesses.

>But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there?

Yes, it was. ~10-20 years ago, local restaurants and businesses would pay high school / college kids a pittance set up a simple website for them. No online ordering, but they would usually have a menu, phone number, and hours.

The result was that the pages didn't all look like SquareSpace templates, and a lot of young people got their first leg up into a tech career.

Remember there use to be celebrity websites, fans use to create websites for their favourite celebs? Not anymore. Now you only see celebrity profiles and bunch of fanpages posting same content all over again.

Yet, you have full blown communities with people creating art for their role models / artists. Take like pewdiepie and his subreddit, the creations there are nothing more than amazing, from video to even handcrafted art. Several artists have fun communities like this and they can interact with them directly.

Great point. Most people can create an old-school website with a little effort using few or basic tools, but creating something that can host a community is/was much harder. phpbb was about the limit.

It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.

It goes even deeper than that. Take the term "X Twitter" or "X Youtube" where X is literally any subject, or group you can think of.

I frequent Youtube a ton and I noticed there are distinct communities on there like "Car Youtube" or "Gaming Youtube", hell there's entire communities built up around busting scammers on Instagram (those guys posting with stack of cash and a Lambo).

You start watching one channel and realize these guys do colabs with others in that space. Just a few months ago 3-4 Car Youtubers I watch got together and created "CarTrek" which is like a full blown TopGear esque car show.

> Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough?

I don't trust the platforms you cited, so when I want to call a restaurant and they want my business, they must have a website.

Besides, I don't want a third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.

Does that mean you won't eat at restaurants who don't have a website?

There are a multitude of restaurants. I am personally familiar with many of them, some with websites, others without. That's not the situation I'm writing about.

If I am considering patronizing an unfamiliar restaurant, and my only source of information about it is some untrustworthy third party platform, I'm moving on. Like I said, many restaurants exist, I'm losing nothing by going somewhere trustworthy.

And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not want some third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.

With regard to restaurants, this perspective doesn’t make sense to me, primarily because reviews are found on third party services and not on the restaurant’s website. If I’m going to a new area, I rely on ratings and reviews to know if I want to try the restaurant.

Then you don't really know what has been going on with reviews. Some are legits of course. But more and more the bulk is paid humans from the other side of the world mastering their art for writing a review, with the tone of a local.

Possibly, yes. If I am unfamiliar with the restaurant, or I have a question regarding their menu or my dietary restrictions, if they do not have a website with an email address or contact form AND they do not react in reasonable time, I will not eat at that restaurant.

Without question if I can’t find a menu online I will not visit the restaurant. Doesn’t mean they need their own website though, just need to show up on some aggregator when I google food near me and peruse the results to pick something.

When you call you are using telcos as 3rd parties asserting itself into your relationship with the restaurant.

Why stop there? Please allow me to note others with technical middleman status: speaker/microphone manufacturers, cable manufacturers, chip foundries, silicon and copper smelters, the people who make the machines that make the smelters, on and on until we get to the first fusion of hydrogen to create helium soon after the Big Bang.

Neutral carriers and infrastructure providers have shown decades of tolerable neutrality [0], and are obviously a much different (and lower) threat model for contacting restaurants than the "Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app}" third party platforms to which I referred. These platforms have proven, year after year, to perform despicable acts of surveillance and experiments in psychological manipulation. They're called out for it, and they sometimes apologize and promise to "do better" in the future. Then they immediately go back to performing their creepy shit without remorse, and the cycle repeats.

"Fool me once..."

[0] Carriers and infrastructure providers certainly have unacceptable problems selling data+metadata to third party platforms, and I also note with righteous fury their enabling of illegal, unethical, and creepy-as-fuck government wiretapping and eavesdropping. They do not, for example, intercept my orders by showing some phone number other than the restaurant's. They don't disguise their call center as a restaurant's phone line. Their creepy psychological profile on me is less granular.

Someone might claim, "Oh, but Facebook has never done anything like that." Neither did Yelp or GrubHub or the others, until they did. These platforms have shown, over and over, they cannot be trusted. I'm not going to trust these middlemen. I can have a relationship directly with my food providers, and it benefits the provider and me, without worry that some asshole will someday decide they will manipulate me or the restaurant, simply because they possess that dubious ability.

Sure, it's the easiest way for small businesses, but in doing so, they are giving away too much of their marketing and branding - until they become hostages. Not good, specially for online businesses.

It's like selling a product on marketplaces: inevitably, that fateful day comes when the platform decides to change the rules – against your best commercial interests – and the only two options you have are: stay, keep your head down and obey... or leave and start almost from scratch.

> they don't need a website anymore.

until they get kicked off

Sometimes down votes are so hilarious.

Whatever nice things one can say about platforms (and there are many) people are going to get kicked off. Of course the majority of the time they did something that was not allowed. No one can be mr perfect 24/7 365 days of the year, the rules can be totally idiotic too of course, at the scale the big platforms work false positives are [sadly] impossible to avoid.

But it doesn't matter. The platforms have to do house keeping, its unavoidable. If one deserved to get kicked off is entirely besides the point: It is not your website, you are a guest.

Your own website is an entirely different story. You have to break actual laws and you may deserve your day in court.

Compared to the cyborg-kangaroo court this is the superior deal. You can down vote me all day long, I have not broken any laws. You cant persecute and silence me for stating the obvious. On HN however this is how things work, you feel the statement lacks effort, is off topic or whatever other reason you can think of and then people get silenced.

I sure as hell hope HN doesn't implement an internet kangaroo court room (like wikipedia has, woah the walls of text generated by tiny issues!) but you can expect people not to speak their mind, not share their version of the story, to attempt to live up to your expectations and learn to survive your judgement.

This is why you need your own website.

Yeah. Centralized content silos defeated personal websites by being more attractive to both creators ("all viewers in one place") and viewers ("all content in one place"). It's a tough nut to crack.

The content silos handle creation and hosting well, but they're generally mediocre at promotion unless you're already hot (though this did not used to be the case). The only nut that needs to be cracked to pull off content creators is no-strings creation/hosting along with decent visibility in SERPs.

> but they're generally mediocre at promotion unless you're already hot

Promotion is up to you no matter where you place your work.

You end up promoting a page where the competitor is 1 click away. You are investing in facebook first, your own business second. That people click follow doesn't mean you just get to send out messages. That you have a lot of likes doesn't mean people clicked the like button. Then there is the privacy of your audience. They might not care about it, you should set higher standards.

> You end up promoting a page where the competitor is 1 click away

An optimist would look at that and think how great it is that they are one click away from their competitors.

FB is making billions for a reason, there has to be something that works there. I'm an optimist too, I believe its just that people are still naive enough to use FB. I hope it implodes sooner rather than later so that things can go back to normal. :-)

I mean in the early 2000s there was MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. That’s not all that different from Facebook, Medium, Tumblr in the way you’re saying. Those older platforms were way more customizable though, and frontpage definitely helped. You also had sites like geocities and angelfire that got a lot of non technical people interested in making websites.

From a consumer perspective, the big difference is that back then, the content on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. was discoverable. It could be found entering relevant search terms into Google or another secarch engine and the more useful content was self-curated by the creator(s) via prominent internal links, WordPress pages, stickied posts on forums and the sites themselves often had useful site-specific searches.

The two big problems with modern social media silos is that

1. content is ephemeral and that older content is not easy – or possible – to find.

2. they optimise for content that will push emotional buttons to drive “engagement” so they can sell viewers to advertisers

MySpace might have been a visual mess but I found it useful for finding out about a band or musician and listening to sample music (all without having to create an account on the platform). I came across all sorts of interesting niche content and communities on blogs, LiveJournal and web forums. These sites were all a lot more open; in most cases, you could easily view the content without having to have an account. If you liked a community and wanted to contribute you could create an account without having to worry about the site owners tracking you across the Internet.

Back in the day, setting up my own site was the best thing I did. And the skills I learned by doing so have evolved into a 25 year professional career.

You're right about Social networks etc. They ate bloggers' lunch.

Far too many people aren't prepared to teach themselves how things work these days and do things for themselves.

One of the greatest regrets I have as a webdev/designer was to give in to constant requests to make things 'fool-proof' in the name of growth.

Users never 'learned' anything. Like how to follow instructions or use a new UI/UX. Everything got dumbed-down.

Now look where we are on those networks. It's mostly an absolute mess of utter drivel. 'posted' (not created) by those 'fools'.

Starting out with a dumb UI shouldn't be a problem as long as you are free to progress to greener pastures. It shouldn't be that you have to learn how to take apart a type writer before you can write a book, the technology doesn't require it.

A clear road beyond will also take down the walls around the silos since effort to control the user would come at a price (force them off the platform(s) faster)

We could perhaps start by separating the API from presentation? Have A scalable chunk of FOSS at first hosted by a megacorp but easily moved some place else and A presentation platform where people build their gui that is as easily moved.

(Just thinking out loud, didn't put much thought in it.)

edit: your own domain should be an obvious ingredient. Which seems to suggest that domains should be free?

Exactly what I thought. He's thinking about the internet of the old. People have different expectations today. They expect reposts, shares, comments etc. He'd need a Frontpage that can trivially build servers and services. You can live without these, but in my opinion people would not want to be perceived as an antisocial weirdos. Soon they will expect neural network powered features like in their mobile apps.

I would blame the lack of motivation for content production.

Oh sure YouTube is full of great content but most is motivated by income generation through ads and patrons.

So basically we need a frontpage style static CMS (perhaps something like GUI around gatsby) that publishes to one of a bunch of providers that have APIs, such as DigitalOcean.

The project could be backed up somewhere transparently, but the key thing would be that it wouldn't be tied to any one provider. If DO were to delete your content, you could just pick a different one.

This looks like Stackbit (stackbit.com). Not affiliated with them at all.

A static CMS that makes calls to an API that stores changing data...basically PHP (or whatever) and a SQL database.

It would be interesting to see an analysis of the pros and cons of whatever you are describing versus a traditional dynamic site with SQL backend.

Pretty much. Also, WHOIS privacy is such a mess that I really don't know if I recommend people set up too much stuff themselves what with all the awful people in the world.

Almost every domain registrar nowadays offers (usually for free) WHOIS Guard, which throws a very imposing barrier between your contact info and any random person.