I just read that 2024: Year of the Personal Website and it feels like a call to arms. People deserve the dignity of understanding that what they write and create will be available to those who want to read it. This is part of why I’ve embraced the #indieweb.
A quote from Matthias Ott:
And there are still so many sites to be built and blog posts to be written and published. So, how about we make 2024 the year of the personal website again?
I say: YES.
Also loving to see that folks with a larger profile are spreading the word to the masses. Anil Dash‘s piece in Rolling Stone The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again notes that:
But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent.
Anil’s piece is broader in scope than personal websites but rings true for a moment where people have things to say and feel constrained by the limits of the stacks which make it more difficult than seems reasonable to simply let me see and read the posts from people I chose to follow. When folks talk about shadowbans, or have posts removed, or feel the need to speak in code, those are signs that the private silos like Facebook (including Instagram and Threads), Twitter and others are not doing right by us. Mastodon is better. Bluesky is newer but is still scaling up and I suspect will hit the point where it will feel the need to behave similarly.
The web–the personal web–gets around that.
Make Mine Indieweb!
