Posted Saturday, May 10th, 2025 at 08:10 UTC

There was a time, long ago, when personal websites thrived. Before a handful of giants muscled their ways to the front, everything that could be was shifted over to walled-off apps, and even search results were replaced with poorly summarized hallucinations that aimed to keep people from venturing too far out again.

Individuals designed and cared for their own unique little corners of the digital landscape, offering up whatever came to mind or caught their fancy on the plots they built and owned. You didn’t have to follow someone in half a dozen separate places to see as much of the world through their eyes as they tried to share. You could stumble across their little garden, and if you enjoyed the things they tended to, you could pop back around whenever you felt like. And from theirs you might even find paths linking to those of friends and common interests.

No need to even know which of the opaque and disconnected industrial silos claimed ownership over a piece of their identity, or to sift through all the inescapable for-you chaff in the hopes you might be able to glimpse a few of their contributions. No need to start over from scratch every time a platform failed, morphed into something unrecognizable or unusable, got caught in a stagnant puddle while the crowd passed it by, or just turned into a nazi bar.

The Apps spent the last decade-plus bulldozing over the open Internet. In its place they offered only engagement-at-any-cost algorithmic swamps of ever-more-bot-filled slop to make the lines on ad revenue charts forever go up and to the right. At least when they weren’t busy being implicated in genocides.

That’s perhaps a bit too dismissive of all the many personal and community sites which have kept their lights on and even thrived. It’s distorted through the lens of my own experience, building and running various sites in starts and fits over more years than I’m about to mention here. Finding myself tempted by the consolidation because of the ease of entry and the excitement, however ultimately toxic, of each like and new follow. But it’s not a unique take and there’s no denying the trend of consolidation onto closed, centralized platforms over the past decade. Platforms owned and operated by entities whose profit motives occasionally aligning with the interests of those who create and share original works is at best a mere coincidence, and one becoming more rare every day as those works are being fed without consent into the sausage grinders of generative slop factories.

I enjoyed the earlier days and am grateful to all those who kept their gardens alive, as well as the handy dandy little tools to manage them, so the rest of us may come back and participate in it again.

Here is my attempt to retill the soil of my old, neglected garden. If you enjoy it, wonderful and welcome! Maybe even consider setting down your own if you haven’t already.