When I first got a real internet connection, it was a very different place. It's hard to articulate how amazing it felt to be able to make and share stupid web pages with my friends, and then to have people all over the world look at your home page. A lot of digital ink has been spilled reminiscing about those times, so I won't add to it.
Sharing silly web pages with friends requires some skill. You had to learn a smattering of HTML and then you have to find a place to host it. It's not hard, but it's not the easiest thing in the world, so services sprung up that took care of some of the heavy lifting so anyone with a web browser could share cat pictures without having to know how an HTML tag worked.
Ads crept in and greed followed. The internet wasn't about making silly pages to show your friends, it became an attention-extraction engine that turns cat pictures into dopamine and cash. (You don't get any of the cash.)
I'm as guilty as anyone about feeding this machine. I resisted for a long time, but I gave into peer pressure and joined myspace and facebook and twitter. All of my friends were already there, after all. I kept tabs open to my feed(s) all day every day. Every time I clicked on them, I knew that there would be more stuff to consume, and it scratched that itch in the back of my brain that craves novelty.
I used them for years and let my home page languish. Nobody visited it anyway. People don't really browse the web any more, I'd tell myself. Facebook is just a big ol' party where someone is always there, and twitter is also a party, but the vibe is a little bit different. LinkedIn desperately wants to be facebook.
I knew that google tracked me all over the web with their gmail and google cookies, but I lied to myself and said that it didn't matter. Google was my friend. When facebook started doing the same thing, I didn't pay attention to it because I was blocking ads at this point and it just didn't register. I never thought about twitter doing the same thing. I was selectively blinded to these things because I was looking at the external validation these sites gave. I had traded the ability to share silly web pages with my friends and the ability to communicate with people around the world for pale imitations.
I also realized that I lost the motivation to even make any updates or changes to my home page. I would just spend hours scrolling through feeds and dodging advertisements trading my time, attention, and whatever else my browser leaks for nothing except the possibility that I might find something so interesting that I'll stop scrolling for 30 seconds and then forget about the whole experience in 20 minutes.
I closed my Facebook account in 2017. I stopped posting to twitter when the new owner took over. I have no plans to go back.
I also have no plans to join bluesky, threads, instagram, discord, reddit, or some other giant site I've forgotten about. I've ceded control of my online presence to the whims of billionaires and advertising companies for long enough. I do have a fediverse account that I'm still using because there are no ads, there's no engagement farming, there's no manipulation of the feed to entice me to stay longer.
I also have my home page. I have projects that I work on. I have a digital presence where I'm not subject to an opaque algorithm choosing who gets to see it.
I know that this confounds a lot of people. I've made it harder for them to contact me, I've made it harder for them to keep up with me. I get that. It's also a lot harder for me to share what I'm doing. If I want to update my website it's a lot harder than just filling out an input box on a webform and hitting 'submit'. Why would I intentionally make things harder?
There are a few reasons. I do it this way because I like it. I like having a web site I can point others to. I like sharing ideas. But mostly, I want want to decide how I use the internet. We should be able to interact with each other and each other's sites more directly than using social media as an intermediary. I don't want an algorithm deciding what I get to see. I no longer have a desire to trade my attention to enrich a billionaire in exchange for looking at cool thing someone made, nor do I have the desire to provide an endless stream of 'content' and then hope that the platform decides to show it to anyone.