Why make a website?

Web Manifesto

Like a lot of people who bother with personal sites nowadays, I have my own dreamy-eyed ideas about what the past might've been like. I can't claim to have much nostalgia or any memories from Web 1.0 or anything, but the web has always been important to me. According to my family I've pretty much been using computers since I was born. Understandably, they regret enabling that, but computers taught me more than they ever bothered to, and I feel like I owe it to the internet that I can think critically at all, so it's hard for me not to feel grateful. It probably helps that I was always an observer, never a participant in forum arguments or trolling or drama or what have you. For me, the web was a wonderful, indifferent world. A home, a teacher, a place to be my real self and get away from whatever was going on "out there". I discovered Neocities in community college, a time when I was trying to visualize a place for myself in a world that I never felt like I was a part of. I'd been surfing Marginalia Search for a couple months, my short-lived attempt to wean myself off of social media. I noticed that a place called Neocities kept getting pulled up in search results, and naturally I wanted to know what that was. I very quickly got all starry-eyed reading web manifestos, especially the stuff on MelonKing's blog. I thought to myself, this is how I make a little room of my own in this place I call home. After years of assuming that "web dev" was some uber-complex techbro thing, discovering Neocities and all these resources felt empowering. There was this feeling of wow, this whole time I could have just been doing this instead of whining.

Discontent

It's no secret that the mainstream web, which is basically just shitty paywalled articles and the social media landscape, Web 2.0 if you will, is actively malicious, feels awful to use, and straight up sucks. There's no need for me to really go on about it here; we all know it and use it anyways. But it's so bleak, isn't it? Growing up it feels like I watched the death of a wonderful thing I only got to see glimpses of and before I was old enough to have my own stake in it. We've all been made to watch it rot and morph into something else entirely. Kids nowadays, well hell even my friends who didn't grow up online, never even had that glimmer of something better to aspire to like I did. Today's web is their "something better" relative to whatever comes next. They have no reason to believe the web can be anything cooler than corporate slop and I find it extremely sad that this is all the web ever was for a lot of people. It's not to say the web was ever some perfect paradise, but at least before you could log off and it was gone. There isn't just logging on or logging off anymore, not really, because the web has just become an extension of our anti-human capitalist hellscape and everything awful that comes with. Generative AI feels relevant to mention too, not as a mere symptom of any one thing, but as the inevitable culmination of everything deplorable about Western culture. It's the destruction of individuality, critical thinking, skill building, human connection and experiences all for the sake of efficiency, productivity, and comfort and at the expense of our planet. And let me make one thing very clear, I could never get behind the notion that technology is inherently evil. I don't like this thinking; it feels like a convenient blame shift away from the people designing the awful garbage we've grown used to seeing on it, manipulating our brain chemistry for profit. I believe very deeply in the potential for technology to support human connection. Just because no corporation thinks it's profitable enough to make into reality, doesn't mean it can't be done.

Moving forward

I suppose this is where the dream of the "web revival" slots in, because the mainstream web isn't all there is. The web revival is a different path forward, one that gives people, with all of our differences and oddities and interests, the tools to celebrate ourselves and create our own spaces online, with tech as an ally. When you code a website, it's yours. Even if Neocities stopped existing tomorrow, I'd still have all my site files, I'd still have all my learned coding skills to repurpose elsewhere if I wanted. Neocities features elements of social media, but they're really for convenience, and you can replace or supplement them on your site with a guestbook, chat, hit counter, RSS feed if you want. It's just a place to put your site, it's not your site. And obviously, it's not the only hosting service out there, either, and I don't particularly "root" for any service, that'd be silly; Neocities is just what I'm familiar with.

Nostalgia driven sites are probably so popular because that's what our main point of reference is for the values we care about—creative expression, individuality, skill-building, and ownership, in the sense that we won't lose anything if our web host shuts down tomorrow. A lot of us want to recreate those glimpses of the "better" we caught the tail end of in childhood. But going retro is not the only path, and we can never go back to Web 1.0 anyways. We have to move forward, but we can take inspiration from what was good and make something better, something for others to find and aspire to down the line when the world feels bleak. A website sounds like a meager little thing, but I believe in it as an art form, and as an antidote to the breakneck pace of social media. Everything you have ever loved or created, you can put on a website, a little world designed and created by you for anyone to happen upon and experience. Anybody with a hobby, an interest, something to say has something worth putting on a website, and it's meaningful because they cared enough to create it themselves. To stumble upon an obscure handmade personal site that hasn't been updated in 1, 3, or 12 years is to experience the heart of a real person somewhere on Earth from a moment in time. That is, in my mind, incredibly human and the real potential of connectivity through the internet.

One of the biggest reasons I decided to make my site the way I did was to help myself embrace more authenticity. I think that my generation struggles a lot with true sincerity, and honestly, it disturbs me a little. Even the whole "cringe but free" mantra that became trendy in the past couple years is born of insecurity, a guard disguised as vibes and packaged as yet another marketable label for us to slap on ourselves. I have watched everyone, including myself, becoming deeply ironic and unapproachable, and human connection and detachment seems to be an issue for most of us nowadays. Well, a feeling can't change the world, and neither can a website. But I have to live with myself and to do that I ache to make something real. For me right now that means making a soulful little website so that's what I'm gonna do.

It takes all sorts to make a world

It’s important to remember that, ultimately, the web exists because of its users. And plenty of us are still here with a whole lot of heart and soulful bullshit to put out there into the world. Sure, things could just keep getting worse forever as far as I know; the modern world is a bad-thing factory and it's hard not to feel crushed under the weight of its output at times. But so long as some of us continue to express the human essence of ourselves, that thing that many of us call the “soul” of the old web, then this dream of the web, this dream of technology used to support rather than break down or compete with humans, will live on. I know I won't live long enough to see the world get much better, as it inevitably will, and to be honest, sometimes that does make me very sad. But that doesn't mean there is no meaning or value to be found in what exists now. This hand-coded little website is my own meager contribution to a dream of a better, humanistic web. Working on it is a means of reminding myself that there is still good somewhere in the world. It is a vessel for a ghost to say they were once here, too. Even if it didn't matter, I was here.