This is a first draft. If it's not very good, pretend that's a purposeful artistic choice or something. Alternatively, if it's great, then pretend that I'm a modern Shakespeare.

To be honest, the rationale behind making a personal website feels self-explanatory. I cannot imagine a user of the modern Internet who isn't viscerally disappointed with the experience they have. The Internet as it currently exists is not communal ground, what it's best suited for, but is instead a packaged product, designed to appeal most to advertisers and shareholders. And that's in the best-case scenarios. Twitter is used by its oligarch, Nazi-saluting CEO to pump out propaganda to hand the presidency to his openly fascist friend. Facebook is designed to send your parents and grandparents into a doom spiral of misinformation, where they sell everything but their social security numbers to a faceless corporate mass. And YouTube, when it isn't actively funneling people towards the alt-right, rewards provocateurs and criminals -- and not even the fun kind of criminals. All of these sites steal everything they can get their hands on to push into the meat grinder of generative AI to pump out ChatGPT prompts and airbrushed, uncanny pieces of "art", so that, in the latest quarter, they can dump their artists and writers on the street to starve. They muzzle you so you can't say suicide or death or kill or sex or queer or trans or anything, anything at all. They boil our oceans and raze our forests, starve their workers and their competition. All of this, all to point to a graph on a wall, and say that the number went up by one.

If it seems like I'm angry, it's because I am. I was born in a time where this Internet was already taking shape, and yet it's hard not to feel like something was stolen from me -- stolen from us. In its best, most well-preserved corners, the Internet is a communal space. It can provide safety and comfort to the marginalized, those whose voices would otherwise be algorithm-ed into silence. But these corners are sparse, and filled themselves with veins of cruelty. There never was a "perfect" Internet, and many of the ways in which it has arguably been made more corporate are also things that have made it safer. I like the fact that I'm no longer a few careless clicks away from LiveLeak footage. But the Internet that could exist, the utopian vision of it that I see in my head, never will until the 1%'s lust for capital no longer surpasses its humanity. And unfortunately, that reality gets further and further away each second. Profits over people; wealth over welfare; capital over community; the few over the many.

That being said, niches are never impossible to find. Many people lived full, fulfilling lives during the fall of the Roman empire. If the world hands you a chunk of limestone and claims it's a house, you carve into it until you've made a cave big enough for everyone around you to live in. In a sense, the indie web is a manifestation of active hope. It's not the best-possible-scenario version of the Internet, but it's a version of it that I like more than the rest, for a few reasons.

I have downloaded TikTok exactly twice in my life, and both times I uninstalled it within a week. Watching it felt like starvation. It felt like being hungry and eating only empty calories, a sense of listlessness and not-entirely-distraction. It felt the way I feel in the depths of winter, seeing so many things I could be doing that I logically know I used to enjoy that now feel like nothing.

Unfortunately, its business model was so attractive that virtually every major money-grubbing site began copying it. Constant short-form content, distractions just present enough to catch the eye but not substantive enough to actually be fulfilling, seeping into every corner of the Internet like mold.

This sort of content does have its place. In the same way that ice cream can be a good treat but isn't a meal, shortform video content can be a good way to relax but cannot substitute for anything more substantial. I work 12 hour overnight shifts at a hospital; when I get home, I watch YouTube shorts until the endless stream of repetitive content melts into my brain. But I don't like the abundance of it.

I don't really like talking about this in terms of attention span. I have ADHD; I'm never going to have a good attention span, and I honestly don't see the point in getting hung up about it. Discussing this through the lens of attention span, even when well-intentioned, can feel a little... demeaning? But it's undeniable that the modern Internet has us trained. We hallucinate itches as phones buzzing, jump at water rushing through pipes. I shower and, in the orchestra of households humming, hear a buzz that I convince myself is the phone going off. Beyond shortform content, much of the media we consume is designed a similar way: AI images meant to look pretty at a first glance and evoke nothing on a second, music made for the ten-second TikTok soundbite, influencers reguritating other people's content for meaningless drama. We gorge ourselves on it because it's easy, and we live in times where we need easy. I have coworkers who do sixteen twelve-hour shifts in a row to afford rent and clothes, patients who come in frostbitten because they're sleeping on the streets because the nastiest roach-infested apartment on the block requires money most people only get through selling their kidneys on the black market. We tune into news that another right has been taken away, another year is going to be spent toiling for no reward. Of course people love TikTok! Of course they're outsourcing their brains to machines! Thinking requires acknowledging the fact that the present moment is almost intolerable. I can't blame anyone for getting hooked on TikTok the same way I can't blame anyone for getting hooked on gambling or sex or drugs. If you're living without a roof over your head, of course you're going to turn to the most potent source of comfort you can. If you're living knowing a single bad week will have you on the streets, the closest source of comfort is just a little bit more electronic. I can only blame the corporate interests behind the TikTok-ification of the Internet. Corporations thrive off of the public engaging in white noise rather than getting invested in something with more meaning. The more educated the public, the more we realize they're screwing us over. The less educated the public, the more gullible and the more easily misled. Americans voted in Trump because a lot of Americans don't know what a tariff is.

That being said, I do think my dependence upon a quick fix is something I want to work on. I don't want to spend all my time wasting away, becoming unable to read anything but the auto-generated captions on a 45 second YouTube skit that was originally made for TikTok. The only way an individual can shift away from the current paradigm is to become immersed in something different, something new, to transform your experience on the Internet into something generative. To spend the majority of your time consuming is to languish. Generative AI is a plague upon this earth in part because creativity is what allows animals to become divine. Outsourcing your ability to create to the Art Theft Machine is tantamount to selling your soul to the Devil. If we wait long enough, perhaps it will melt enough icebergs to create Hell.

The main way you interact with most social media sites is through consumption. This isn't inherently bad, but it promotes stagnation. The main way you interact with the indie web is through creation. It's fun to explore any given webring or incredibly long series of crosslinks, but it's significantly morefun to learn how to code and make something. I've enjoyed learning a new skill. That's an experience I hope everyone can have, on the indie web and outside of it.

A long time ago, I read an article about maximalism that described it as a museum dedicated to yourself. My apartment is a museum of me; it contains cards I've recieved mounted on cardboard and sealed with Modge-Podge, book and CD collections, numerous framed photos of my parents' cats. The ideal site on the indie web is a museum of its creator. Without describing themself using any words, the webmaster's personality, interests, and aesthetics come through. Consider ribo.zone, with its eclectic, overgrown feel, or the pastels of plasticdino; the shrines and aesthetics serve as a museum dedicated to the webmaster.

Shrines with explicit discussions of why the webmaster enjoys the material the shrine is dedicated towards are a treasure to find. No literary analysis is more valuable than that created by a strange autistic person. On personal websites, you're forced to engage more thoroughly with the writer. On traditional social media sites, it's incredibly easy to take someone out of context, to assume that the snide remark they made is the entirely of their personality or that they truly don't understand the topic they're obviously just pretending to know nothing about. At times, it feels hard not to flatten people. You don't see the things that led up to someone making that poorly-worded post, you just see the post out in the wild and react to it. That's much harder to do when you're literally surrounded with reminders of who that person is. Every blinkie, every image, every asset, was hand-placed, in the sort of artistic decision that goes into decorating your apartment. It's a museum; it's a garden; it's home.