I made this website because of the state of the internet in 2025 (the year I’m writing this): gobbled up by a small number of large tech corporations, each owners of massive social media silos, within which are virtual public squares as we know them, but privatized, and subject to the whims of the emotionless, blind logic of capital. We’ve been reduced online to producers of data commodities, and potential consumers of other commodities, allowed to reside in social media spaces only because we make money for the technocratic capitalist class. You own nothing that you put on social media, and whatever is there can be taken away at any time, for any reason (or no reason at all).

Presenting “just make your own website” as the solution is stupid. Websites cost money if you want to be in charge of them. And complete control isn’t even possible unless you run your own server (?!) and put your site on it. Even paying a company to host your website, though, is a massive step in the right direction toward liberating your online presence from corporations.

Most people either can’t afford to do this, though, or can afford it but wouldn’t know where to start (I don’t blame them) or don’t care enough to try. Valid reasons all.

And even if you have the wherewithal to host your own website, you may not even want to. Just as factories socialized the production of goods by bringing large amounts of people together in one space at one time, corporations have socialized the process of being online. When technologies enable us to exist and operate online together in one space, the means of online communication becomes centralized (planned and organized). People sign up for Instagram because all their friends are there; everyone is there. And everyone can find and talk to everyone else (with exceptions, of course). Information goes everywhere, instantly. A personal website does not necessarily offer this.

Decentralized movements like the IndieWeb will only ever be niche as long as money, knowledge, time, effort, and functionality are still barriers against the liberation of the internet.

Until people are allowed to exist online freely (not beholden to companies), the only people making websites for themselves will be enthusiasts, tech workers, or other sporadic, curious types who happen to also have the time, the knowledge, and the money to pursue making a website. And these websites will often still be bound by monetary motivations.

I’m not immune from these considerations. I made a website because I want to produce work that I can share online; and for that work to be free to all; but I still have to live, especially if the work requires much time and energy. In order for creative people to pursue their work, they need to be able to fund their work. The wonderful potential of the internet is to not necessarily need to place one’s work behind a paywall. That is the future I want to see.