For a while, the personal website looked like a leftover from an earlier Internet.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, having your own home page was fairly normal for anyone who spent much time online. Internet providers often included a little web space with an account. Services such as GeoCities made it possible for ordinary people to put up pages about their hobbies, families, favorite bands, computers, pets, or whatever else interested them.
The results weren’t always pretty. There was blinking text, animated GIFs, visitor counters, guestbooks, tiled backgrounds and enough “Under Construction” graphics to rebuild the Interstate Highway System. But those sites belonged to people in a way most of today’s Internet does not.
Then we moved. First came blogging platforms, then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the rest of the social web. Maintaining a website seemed unnecessarily difficult when a company would give you a ready-made page, an audience and all the tools needed to publish something in a few seconds. It was a reasonable trade at the time. We just didn’t pay enough attention to the terms of it.
We traded websites for accounts
The distinction seems small, but it matters. A website is a place on the Internet. A social media account is space inside somebody else’s place.
When you own a domain and maintain a website, you make most of the decisions. You decide what gets published, how it looks, how it is organized and how long it remains available. On a social platform, the owner of the platform makes those decisions.
That doesn’t automatically make social media bad. These services solved real problems: easy publishing, a way to find other people, none of the technical knowledge once required to get anything online. But convenience gradually became dependence.
People spent years building collections of writing, photographs, links and conversations inside services whose rules could change at any time. A company could alter its API, insert more advertising, reduce the visibility of outbound links, require an account to read something, discontinue a feature or disappear completely. Your audience was never really yours either. It belonged to the platform. If an algorithm decides that only five percent of the people following you should see something you wrote, that is effectively the audience you have that day.
The old web wasn’t necessarily better
It is easy to turn discussions about personal websites into nostalgia for the supposedly wonderful Internet of 1997. That Internet had plenty of problems. Websites broke. Navigation could be terrible. Search wasn’t nearly as good as it became later. Pages were littered with bad HTML and graphics that took forever to download over dial-up connections. Finding interesting sites often depended on directories, links from other sites, webrings and plain luck.
GeoCities itself eventually became part of Yahoo, which announced in 2009 that it would close the U.S. GeoCities service, prompting archivists to preserve as much of it as possible. So much for permanence.
But the early web got one important thing right: websites linked to other websites. That sounds painfully obvious, but much of the modern Internet has been moving in the opposite direction. Instead of millions of independently operated destinations connected by hyperlinks, much of our online activity takes place inside a relatively small number of very large services. The Web gradually became something we opened an app to use.
People are building little websites again
Personal websites never actually disappeared, of course. Plenty of people kept blogging, maintaining home pages and running their own domains while everyone else’s attention moved toward social media. What has changed is that the idea seems interesting again.
The IndieWeb community has spent years promoting a simple set of principles: own your domain, use it as your online identity, publish on your own site first and keep control of your content.
Neocities takes a somewhat different approach but reaches back to the same tradition. It provides static website hosting along with a directory for discovering other people’s sites, tags reminiscent of old webrings, RSS feeds and tools for editing ordinary HTML. It explicitly promises no advertising and says it will not sell user data for AI training.
Bear Blog strips things down even further. Its home page advertises blogs with no trackers, ads or required JavaScript, along with support for custom domains and RSS and Atom feeds.
These aren’t attempts to recreate 1998 exactly, and that’s important. The useful parts of the old web weren’t 800-pixel layouts or animated mailbox GIFs. They were independence, experimentation and the idea that a person could establish a place online without having to become a “creator” on somebody’s platform.
A recent resurgence of interest in the indie web has even attracted people too young to have experienced GeoCities the first time around. The attraction isn’t simply nostalgia. It is also dissatisfaction with algorithmic feeds, standardized profiles and increasingly corporate online spaces. That may explain why some new personal sites look deliberately handmade. Their owners aren’t necessarily trying to produce bad design. They’re trying to produce something recognizably theirs, and there’s a difference.
Your domain is the important part
A personal website doesn’t require you to run a server in the basement. You can, naturally — some of us find that sort of thing entertaining — but independence on the web doesn’t require maximum technical difficulty.
A static site hosted inexpensively somewhere can be a personal website. So can WordPress. So can a hosted blogging service that allows you to use your own domain and export your work. The domain is particularly important because it gives people a stable way to find you.
Hosting companies can change. Blogging software can change. You can move from one server to another. If you control the domain, the public address can remain the same. That isn’t absolute ownership: domains still depend on registrars, registries and DNS infrastructure, and hosting still has to exist somewhere unless you’re doing it yourself. But there is a considerable difference between depending on replaceable infrastructure and depending on a particular social network for your identity, publishing tools, archive and audience all at once.
Keep your own copy of the files. Keep backups. Use ordinary formats where possible. Point your domain somewhere else when you need to move. That is a much healthier relationship with technology.
RSS makes more sense in this world
Personal websites also make RSS useful again. RSS never really went away either. It simply stopped being fashionable when companies discovered that keeping users inside an algorithmic feed was considerably more profitable than allowing them to decide what they wanted to read.
An RSS reader doesn’t need to guess what should interest you. You subscribe to a site because you want to read it. When the site publishes something, it appears in the reader. That’s the whole trick: no suggested posts, no engagement ranking, no argument inserted into the feed because software determined that making you angry would keep you staring at the screen another six minutes.
A collection of personal websites and an RSS reader can produce a surprisingly good Internet. It will probably be a smaller one. That’s fine.
A website can be something other than a business
One of the stranger developments of the modern web is the expectation that every site needs a purpose that can be explained in marketing language. What’s your brand? What’s your niche? How are you building engagement? What’s the content strategy? Maybe you just want a website. That’s still allowed.
A personal site can contain essays, photographs, bookmarks, project notes, recipes, computer documentation, family history, collections or a page describing what you’re working on. The IndieWeb community even has a convention called a “now page,” meant to sit somewhere between the permanent biography of an About page and the constant chatter of social media. None of this needs to scale, and that may be one of the reasons it’s appealing.
The commercial Internet measures success in millions or billions of users because its economics demand enormous audiences. A personal website can be successful if 50 people enjoy reading it. Or five. Or if the owner enjoys maintaining it and nobody else reads it at all. That was once understood without explanation.
The web is still there
The interesting thing about the return of personal websites is that most of the technology required to build them never went anywhere. HTML still works. CSS still works. Domains still work. RSS still works. Hyperlinks certainly still work. A basic website created today can probably be read by machines and browsers years from now, which is more than can be said for a surprising amount of content trapped inside proprietary applications.
Social networks will continue to exist, and there is no reason to pretend they aren’t useful. A personal website doesn’t require withdrawing from them. Post there, participate there and talk to people there if you enjoy doing it. Just don’t confuse an account with a home.
The personal website is coming back because people are rediscovering something the early Web made obvious: the Internet is more interesting when individuals have places of their own. We spent roughly twenty years moving into a handful of very large apartment buildings. Some people are starting to build houses again.