People these days (you know, Gen Z or whatever. Quite ironic since I would be considered as one of those people, but I live under a rock, on a rock, so it doesn't matter.) are (almost) always on the Internet.

Often, they have their own online identity; defined by their connections to people, their activities online, and who they describe/express themselves as. The latter, these days, usually takes the form of an Instagram profile, Twitter account (RIP Twitter haha) or whatever people are on now. Mostly on social media, a totally friendly space that doesn't involve arguing with random people on stupid things online! (reddit intensifies)

Those are good and all, but.. But.. Okay I lied, they're — to put it lightly — suboptimal. Why, you might ask? Well..

1. You can't really express yourself on social media platforms. They employ and enforce heavy censorship, limiting free speech.¹
2. You are chaining yourself to one specific platform. If people don't know, or know but don't care (or even hate) the platform, you might suffer the same fate as the platform; ignored. Unknown.
3. The page you've (or would have) been assigned isn't really yours. What it looks like is dictated by the social media platform you are on. The only unique thing about your page and everybody else's is your name, bio and image.

Pssh, okay nerd. What could possibly be better than Myspace then?

Simple. Get a personal website. One to call your own. It can be a homepage, a blog, or a combination of the two.

This is rather simple to do, I'll get to that in a bit.

Having your own website is like having our own garden on the Internet. Your own space. It grows with you, and the way you want it to look (that is if you actually put in the time into it). No rules to conform to. Want a minimal site? Make one. Want a retro looking site? Make one. Want an extremely bloated landing page plagued with ads, trackers, and a billion JS scripts², where you brag about your incredible SEO skills? Probably shouldn't do that, but you can make one.

Because it's your website, nobody is around to tell you what you should and shouldn't say. Free speech! This is a double-edged sword, because some people are really messed up and talk about really really uncool things. But you can actually express yourself properly on your own website.

And a blog on your own website is more universal than some random Twitter account. All you need to read it is a browser, and — optionally — an RSS reader. That's it. No sign up required (don't you hate it when you need to read Twitter and it just yells at you for not being signed in?).

You could host the site yourself, either on a VPS (virtual private server) or on some computer in your house. But if you don't have the cash or the resources to do so, you can find a host like Mataroa, Neocities or Bear Blog (bear blog is cool! i'm on bear blog!). Though you might have to abide by their rules and conditions. But if you're not going to be talking about super shady stuff like drugs, you should be fine.

Quoting from 'Every person on the planet should have their own website':

Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want.

Everyone should be writing in public.

It will be safely kept in archive.org for your ancestors (sic) to investigate and ponder on.

Now imagine if you had access to interesting details about your great-grandmother’s sister, or brother, or whatever.

Your corner on the Internet, all about you, in all its entirety. Try that with Twitter.

(by the way, first ever capped title)

---

hated this post? i did too, so you can read more of this junk by subscribing to my RSS feed, bookmarking my blog to check on it every once in a while, or better, subscribing to my newsletter which has a bunch of other cool stuff thrown in :D

--

1. Platforms can have no-no topics in their terms which you agree to when you sign up, but they are also pressured by governments and local authorities to censor certain topics, for good or worse.↩

2. Javascript is tolerable, if you're just going to use it to make funny animating things on your site. Just don't overdo it.↩