30/09/2026 • Social media is locked down by nature. Build your own website, free yourself and your users!
Why Have Your Own Personal Website?
In order to live a good life, you can't just do things for yourself, it has to be toward a greater good. So why should you develop your own website at all? What good can it offer the world?
A personal website is like a plot of land that you own. You get the freedom to present your ideas, thoughts, projects, and other stuff for other people to see. If you have some knowledge about a topic, you can contribute to a network of other websites by hosting your own one. Websites are insanely helpful, as they can introduce you to topics you were unaware of, or expand your current knowledge in a field you're already adept in.
Obviously, your own website won't be easy to find on the clearnet, especially since SEO is a solved problem at this point (and your little website won't be able to compete with something like Medium). But, you can still share your website with your friends and other people you meet directly, because the internet is fairly accessible.
By that, I mean that the internet is also somewhat decentralised. You get to choose where your domain name comes from, how you host your server, what data it collects, without your users having to sign up to a new internet service. Obviously, you're still bound to your DNS provider and their terms, but I guarentee it's not going to be nearly as horrifying as Meta's T&Cs. Furthermore, you don't have to submit your users to cookie banners, logins, facial recognition software, and all that garbage... because you get to build the experience you want for your users.
This "concept" was presented to me in Luke Smith's video, "Get a Website Now! Don't be a Web Peasant!." I didn't quite understand at first, but it makes a whole lot more sense after pondering it for a bit. Not only is it really important to "be your own internet landlord," to own your own domain name, your own web server, etc... but it's also important to contribute something meaningful for everyone. AI may have taken over the "normal" internet, but nothing is stopping you from distributing your knowledge through your own terms.
With this philosophy in mind, I personally decided to rework my current website based on what was mentioned. Rather than building a website that I could hand off to an employer purely to get a job, I will instead build one that can present my knowledge with full independence.
The Modern Internet Is Not Designed For Knowledge
Search engines, to me, are entirely useless nowadays. I simply cannot bare to use them.
The search experience is bad, and the content served is bad. SEO promotes clicks and ad revenue, as opposed to the distribution of knowledge. Each search result has a click-bait-y title along the lines of "8 reasons why...", and once you click on them, you learn it's all just AI generated. If it's AI generated, then why even publish them? It's a far easier to prompt an LLM what you want instead of having someone else craft a prompt for you.
The only search engine I love is https://wiby.me, and if you're interested in an engine that only indexes websites of a classic nature, then this could be a good place to start. Though, it's still not a perfect solution, as the the same infrastructure issues that social media have may start showing up in this engine in time.
Have you noticed how more communities are switching to Discord, and slowly making forums a thing of the past? Now when you have a specific question in mind, you have to submit to Discord's privacy policy, potentially upload a photo of yourself, before finally being able to ask your question. But worse, the answer is only available immediately; you cannot search for the question/answer using search engines afterwards. There is simply no collection of knowledge on Discord. It is a hole of nothingness.
Social media is even worse. People post all of their cool projects and knowledge to these platforms, locking everything behind a psyop. The medium to which this knowledge is presented makes things even worse, because it's all short-form content. These services are designed are to make the platform as engaging as possible, not for any other meaningful purpose. So to actually get the content you want, you have to hope the algorithm serves you what you want, and hope it acts in your best interest. Social media gives us no control over what we want to see.
Your Website Is Your Social Media
At it's core, the concept of social media boils down to allowing people to upload content, and have a community of people interact with it. This concept is by no means bad, it's simply the way it's designed: to lock you down to a single platform, and to make it as hard as possible to find knowledge as possible. The problem was never the social media part, it was who governs the platforms, and the decisions they made.
Thankfully, the internet was designed with an inverse philosophy: to be a free platform for people to serve content with eachother. Well... it's not completely free of course, but it's good enough. Ultimately, your goal should be to liberate yourself from services you don't control, and to distribute your knowledge in a way that is completely accessible to anyone, under your own virtues.
Don't submit to social media's rules. Distribute your domain name instead.