The Homepage Manifesto
There is a sound that comes out of a dial-up modem. If you’ve never heard it, imagine someone put R2-D2 in a burlap sack filled with angry weasels and then threw it down a flight of stairs. If you’re a Xennial, this sound was not only music, it signified the start of something we had to do very intentionally: Go online. It was the first step in a process. It was something special.
It’s kind of hard to imagine now, when you just have to look at your phone or your laptop and the the internet is just…there. “Online” used to be a place you went. Something different was happening in our brains. We were performing a task. Even if that task was stumbling onto a stranger’s page about their obsession with 14th-century Flemish tapestries, replete with poorly lit, pixelated images and at least a few broken links. Maybe they linked to someone else’s page about their favorite band, which contained hand transcribed lyrics to every song in the catalog. No directions, no search, no feed. You just serendipitously discovered new content organically. This was the golden age of the personal website.
This isn’t about nostalgia. I believe personal websites might be the best possible way to understand what the modern social media based internet does to us as people. They also provide us with a much more desirable alternative.
Our collective attention span is at an all-time low. The tragedy of this is that attention is nothing less than the substrate of meaningful communication. Social media sucks up attention and gives very little of value in return. We can’t have real conversations if we can only listen to people shouting things for a few seconds so we can decide if they’re on our team or not. One of the great things about personal websites is that the author gets an opportunity to spell out their ideas in their own way. Social media platforms very intentionally invert this. They standardize thoughts and feelings and opinions so as to remove any friction from consuming them.
A concept which always comes up when talking about social media is “the attention economy”. I like this term, because it implies the value of your attention. It explains why social media must be the way it is, because your attention is where the value is, and that value is being sold to companies that want you to buy their stuff.
Personal websites, in contrast, are a structural counter-move. This isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s a fundamental shift in how we create and use the web. Creating content requires intention and some skills and therefore requires some investment on the part of the creator. You’re less likely to dash off useless tripe if there’s effort involved in doing so. It also requires intention on the part of the reader. You have to dig a bit to get to the stuff you want to read, and you have to invest some time in reading it.
I’m hardly the first person to draw this analogy, but social media sites are like shopping malls. Shiny, clean, consistent and designed and built to get you to buy stuff. Personal websites are like gardens. Uniquely designed, cultivated, and grown for their own sake, with the goal being to share things with people who want to experience them. The homogeneity of social media sites erases the human signal. Personal websites maintain the legibility of the personality that created them.
So what I am advocating here? I’m not suggesting we return the web to its late 90s state. I want us to learn what we can from the web at that time. Then we can take those ideas and approach them with modern tools. I want to capture that deliberate architecture to change the way we connect.
Instead of removing friction, create some. Make a small amount of friction necessary for both the creation and consumption of your content. Make it require intention by design.
Embracing the web intentionally is not about nostalgia. It’s about choosing technologies that improve the quality of our lives and our world. It’s not just about opting out of social media, it’s about knowing what those companies and technologies do and realizing they are a net loss for humanity.
Here’s what I did. Maybe it will work for you. If you do even one of these thing, we’ll all be better off.
Consumption
- I ditched social media. I thought it would be hard. I closed my accounts. I deleted the apps from my phone. It was so much less difficult than I thought. I don’t miss it and it’s as if an enormous psychic weight has been lifted.
- Instead of simply doom scrolling, I set aside time to go on “web journeys”. Giving up social media gave me new chunks of time. So every morning, I wake up, make coffee, play the New York Times word games with my wife and take a quick look at the headlines on Ground News. After that, I take a twenty minute web journey wherein I find an interesting webring and browse until I find something I want to read. If I enjoy someone’s site, I bookmark it, which leads me to my next thing.
- I bookmark things I like. Nothing fancy, I just use my browser’s bookmark feature. I organize them when I can, but I also have a section that’s just random stuff I found that I like. This is so much more intentional and satisfying than scrolling. It makes me feel like I did something. Like I learned something. Like I went somewhere. Intentionally.
Creation
- I created a manageable website I like and want to share with people. Creating it, maintaining it and even looking at it makes me happy. It’s for me and the people who want to interact with it.
- I committed to an update schedule. I write one long-form blog post per week, generally on Sunday afternoon for publishing on Monday morning.
- I joined a number of webrings relevant to my content. This not only helps people find me, but makes my site a way for people to find other interesting stuff.
None of these ideas are original, and I’m not alone in doing these things. This isn’t some fantasy I have that sounds good but will never happen. It’s already happening. There is a whole movement that seeks to help us claw back the web we lost because of social media. Indieweb and The Web Revival are good places to start to get more information about this stuff.
Someone smarter than me pointed out that “The web didn’t die, you’re just not on it.” So go get on it. Anyone can create a website, for free, and put stuff on it. There are places like NeoCities. If you’re more technically inclined, set up your own VPS or server. Hell, maybe build a web server and host it on your home broadband connection. Remember, this is about quality and not quantity, so you probably don’t need any elaborate infrastructure to get going.
If you don’t want to create content, be part of the movement by using the web intentionally. Set aside some time for web journeys instead of doom scrolling. Make your comments kind, encouraging and constructive. Contribute meaningfully to conversations.
Whatever you decide to do, I hope this inspires you to look at the untapped potential of using personal websites instead of social media. I promise the (small) effort is worth the reward.