Here's my website. I know it doesn't look like much, but it's mine. Look! I have have cool gifs and little buttons that you click and it takes you to different pages! There's stuff on those pages that I actually made, I am casting my thoughts out into the void of cyberspace and the coolest part, I made this all by myself. Does it get any traffic? Not really. Do I care? No!
So I suppose the question is why? It seems like a step back right? It's reminiscent of those "Web 1.0" where many websites were made by individuals sharing funny gifs. And I am reminiscing in a way. When the internet was more alive. If you're at least a little bit in the loop you've probably heard about dead internet theory, where essentially the number of bots overtakes the number of actual warm blooded humans and it things devolve into bots responding to bots responding to bots, all powered by massive data centres consuming enough energy and water to power small cities. So why not start a little corner that you know you truly own and have sovereignty over. I think what I really appreciate about those small sites is they seem authentic, which is the complete antithesis of what AI is. They may seem a bit old-fashioned but they feel so genuine.
Generative AI content is everywhere and that's the stuff you are able to notice, it's getting better every day. I wanted to have my own small island away from the hallucinations and the slop where if someone stops by they'll think, "oh okay this is just a dude in his room writing stuff" It's not just a hosepipe of "content" there's a real guy behind the screen there! It adds a sense of intentionality too. By having your own little site you're step outside algorithms, of course you're still at the mercy of Google indexing, but you know that if someone gets to your page it was an concerted effort no matter how small, rather than as a result of mindlessly scrolling.
Tending to your website for me has become kind of therapeutic little project in a way, messing about with HTML and CSS, adding a 25 year old gif, it's like my own little garden and I can have it whatever way I like. I've always enjoyed writing and the hope is that this can be a space to resist that "dopamine economy" feeling that social media has nowadays where it almost feels like an attention parasite that eats away at your time just for advertisers to have more time to sell you crap you don't need.
Also one of the advantageous is that your own site is going to be stable platform. Take twitter as an example with the whole nightmare rebranding that Elon instigated, X is a complete hell hole. I try to avoid it at all costs, honestly, everyone seems to be in their own little echo chamber or arguing with Russian bots, and that's not even mentioning GROK casually creating non-consensual sexual content of random women for anyone who asks for it. It's completely insane.
So I suppose that's the answer really, take back control, spread a little bit of humanity into the dead internet!