Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.
Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire (I made a website about Sailor Saturn from Sailor Moon.). Free web hosting on sites like Angelfire or Geocities was abundant, and you could waste an entire day just looking at the dumb things people put online. Just take a look at the Geocities Gallery—people made websites about their favorite animals, their life experiences, or celebrities they loved, and I devoured all of these things with equal enthusiasm. This website is just a list of links that a guy named Dave likes! This person from Texas wanted to mail people giallo movies on VHS! This is literally just pictures of North Vietnam, taken by a person from South Vietnam who now lives in America!
If you could figure out how to host your own website, you’d have even more freedom over the design and the content. Other than LiveJournal, this was my first introduction to the power of fandom. Ohtori.nu was a website maintained by diehard Utena fans and included scanned animation cells, critical analysis and their own translation of scripts. The fact that the site is still up and still hosting mostly the same material is a testament to the small group of people who made and maintained it.
Social media erased the need to build a website to express yourself online. Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends. On top of that, MySpace had total ownership of that page, meaning when the site was bought and sold, individual users had no say in the changes. By 2019, you couldn’t even look at your old MySpace accounts anymore because they lost all the data from prior to 2016.
Though we all moved to these platforms for their convenience, over time they became less convenient.
This only accelerated as we moved to new social media, like Facebook, which was determined to keep all important contact information within the app. Instead of a local business making a website on Geocities, they would make themselves a Facebook page—or now, an Instagram account—because all their customers likely had Facebook accounts already.
Though we all moved to these platforms for their convenience, over time they became less convenient. I don’t remember exactly when or why I stopped looking at Facebook, just that now it’s overrun with AI slop and has become barely usable. Twitter is experiencing the same “enshittification” process as we speak: After the election, users left the Elon Musk-owned platform in droves, unwilling to centralize the way they talk to people online around this one website. Not that it matters much—Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have already made billions of dollars off of convincing everyone to invest their time into these websites, and if they had their way, you would spend even more time there, earning them even more money.
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
I didn’t realize how important that was until I started my own website, and I didn’t even learn it from helping to run the damn thing. When I meet people at events, they tell me that they’ve set Aftermath as their homepage. People tell me they love interacting with other people in the comments. They tell me it’s one on a small list of websites, not social media, that they check in on every day. People, it seems, actually like going to a website, and they like that we made one.
We were already long overdue for a return to websites we control, rather than feeds manipulated by tech oligarchs
I cannot remember the last time I actually went to a website and browsed, took my time discovering the way a person expressed themselves through code. Does anyone else remember the website Superbad, a little personal project that took you through bizarre web design experiments? Zombo com? These websites are still around because they don’t depend on the benevolence of a billionaire for their existence.
“Building our own websites, making independent media, and striving for more democratic social networks—I think these are some of the small but crucial things we need to be doing to create alternatives to the monopolistic, billionaire-owned and increasingly authoritarian tech ecosystems currently dominating our lives,” Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, told me. “We still have to figure out how to triumph over extractive tech companies and curtail aggressively toxic social networks that encourage the spread of hateful messages, and to fund and elevate alternatives not in thrall to tech billionaires, but building working models is a necessary and urgent first step.”
It is clear that tech billionaires like Musk know that when they own the means of communication, they run the whole show. If you’ve made a home on Twitter, you’re basically completely vulnerable to Musk’s randomly changing whims, and also his disgusting political beliefs. He campaigned with Trump and immediately congratulated him when he won the election. Also congratulating the President-elect were Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, two tech oligarchs who also want us to use their proprietary apps and websites for everything in our lives.
“We were already long overdue for a return to websites we control, rather than feeds manipulated by tech oligarchs,” Molly White from Web3 Is Going Great! told me. “Now that they’ve made it clear how eager they are to help usher in authoritarianism, I think it will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”
To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before. If you look at my work on Kotaku, there’s so many garbage ads on the screen you can barely see the words. Waypoint and Motherboard are both being run like a haunted ship, pumping out junk so that Vice’s new owners can put ads on it. I don’t have to worry about that anymore—I don’t have to worry about my work being taken down or modified or sold, or put in an AI training set against my will. I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.
