Created: 2023-08-26

To build oneself a home

I recently updated my website, which was quite a bit of work, but also fun. One of the main reasons I wanted to revisit it was that I was quite tired of social media platforms and their inevitable enshittification, and I wanted to spend more of my internet time on something I could properly call my own.

Facebook has been going downhill for at least a decade, making it harder and harder to actually see the posts you want to see (and from the other side, making it harder to put a post in front of the people who want to see it). I left a couple of years ago, when I noticed how few of the posts I saw there were at all interesting or relevant. I've hardly ever been on twitter X, but I hear it's going pretty steeply downhill over there. I closed my reddit tab two months ago, and haven't been keeping track of what's going on with the API pricing and all that.

The only platform I'm still using is Tumblr, and I'm not sure how long I'm staying there — recently, they've been updating their UI to look more like twitter X, they're simplifying, they're removing some features that were a pretty core part of navigation on the site. So I might drop that too, if it gets irritating enough.

I'm not some big content creator, but I do want someplace where I can put my stuff — photos, writing, whatever other hobbies I might get into in the future. And I want it to be stable; I don't want anybody other than me in control of what it looks like, whether it stays up, and what stuff I can put there. This website is that place.

I think more people should get a website

Running your own website is rewarding, in a very different way than having a social media profile is. I think anyone who wants to post anything on the internet should try having one. It's not very good for discoverability, but it's great for control.

TikTok is for video, Instagram for images (with short descriptions), twitter X has a character limit, and all of them will censor your posts if their algorithm deems the content too mature for advertisers. On your own website, you can post anything you want, in any format you want. You also do not have to worry about things like posting at the right time of day to maximize engagement — the things you post on your own website won't disappear in an endless stream of content.

Some of the rising twitter X clones are advertising customizability — Hive lets you choose between 35 different colors, wow, and also put music on your profile page — but nothing will ever be as customizable and flexible as a website you made yourself. Zach Mandeville has written a pretty good ode to the joys of having a website on his own site, if you need more convincing.

But how will people see my stuff?

While the previously mentioned endless stream of content can bury your posts, it's also the primary way for others to find those posts. Subscribers get to see (some of?) your posts in their feed automatically, and others might see them if they've shown interest in similar topics. Without such a mechanism, people either have to manually check your website every now and then, or you have to provide some other way of getting updates. For this website, I've chosen to publish an RSS feed that people can subscribe to with any RSS reader, but you could also create an email newsletter. If you use pretty much any blogging software, an RSS or Atom feed will be built in.

...or it could be more of a link hub

If nothing else, in these times of platform decay, having a website of your own gives people a place to find you that won't just disappear. The minimal useful website is one that links to other places where people can find you, so that when you move from twitter X to mastodon to bluesky to wherever, people can use your website to find out where your stuff is now.

This is pretty much the purpose of Linktree. The reason I don't like that one much is that you cannot use a custom domain for it — Linktree can close down, and then your nice linktr.ee/whatever page will be gone. Meanwhile, I could point tayacan.dk at any platform that allows a custom domain (Linktree does not). Currently it's pointing at a VPS I'm renting, but if that company dies or changes their terms or otherwise no longer satisfies my needs, I can just change it. I can take the source code with me or build something new. That is, I think, as much stability as one can ask for when it comes to the internet.

It's not terribly difficult

If you're not familiar with any kind of coding, making a custom website can sound intimidating — and sure, you'll need to learn some new things, but it doesn't have to be an ordeal. There are excellent guides, including video tutorials, to learning a little html and css, enough to build a nice-looking personal website, without necessarily becoming an expert. The most important thing to remember is that you don't have to learn it all at once. You can start with a very small and simple site, and then improve on it bit by bit.

As for getting your website online, you need just two things: A domain name, and hosting. Hosting is a server, typically owned by someone else, that is accessible to the wider internet. You can pay for a web hotel if you want to, but there are also many free hosting options. If you make your website with basic html and css, you can host it for free on W3Schools Spaces, GitHub Pages, or a similar service.

A domain name is the address for your website, like my tayacan.dk. You buy it via a registrar, who then manages it for you. This usually costs a small fee for the registration, and then roughly $15 a year. Your registrar then gives you access to a control panel where you can set up a DNS A record, which tells the wider internet which IP address your domain should point to. If your hosting provider allows custom domains, they'll have a page somewhere that (a) tells you what IP address to type into your A record, and (b) lets you type in your domain name and save it, so their server will know which domains to allow. This prevents other people from pointing their domain name at your website.

If you buy your domain and hosting from the same company, you may not even have to think about DNS — they'll set it all up for you, and you just have to upload your html files.