# Having a website is not revolutionary

published: 2022-06-03

An introductory paragraph to a poorly-researched blog post that desperately wishes it were a manifesto. A manifesto, a call-to-arms (even though the social circles who write these invariably tend to be anti-gun), a hastily-woven myth about the loss of freedom on the Internet, capital I or not. A capital I, an assortment of individuals, an early Internet of personal webpages full of blinking GIFs and tables as layout and "Under Construction" banners. According to the myth, this was a place full of individuals expressing their freedom and individuality until the Big Bad Corporations came along with social media and the websites disappeared. That is, until one day where apparently some of those people previously sucked into social media remembered that HTML existed and went from sharecropping on a social media platform to sharecropping on a shared hosting platform.

I find it hilarious that I see so many "revival of the old internet" manifestos that claim to be about individuality and creativity and then invariably regurgitate this myth, if shuffling a few of the details around here and there. What exactly is so creative about remaking the same Geocities-inspired layout for the billionth time? What is so humane about creating webpages almost incapable of being navigated by screen readers and keyboard-only input mechanisms and other assistive technologies? (Accessibility isn't only for the blind, you know.) What is so decentralized about all conglomerating on a handful of sharecropping sites: Neocities, Ichi, Codeberg Pages...?

Online companies have always sold your data. The Internet has always been a collection of walled gardens. Online advertisements have always existed in some form. Yes, advertising has gotten worse with its omnipresent tracking, and social media networks are still for the most part non-interoperable, and, well, anyone who's been online in the past decade knows Facebook is practically shorthand at this point for collecting and selling user data. But the world of the online has improved in so many more ways. Most "normies" who've begun to give even a single shit about their privacy know about the Tor Browser and, even if for the infamous YouTube adverts, what a VPN is. Hosting a website is no longer reliant on having a static IP address and money to purchase a domain, or, if one is using peer-to-peer software like Freenet, even a persistent connection. I can access the same websites on my shitty rural ISP's connecton as someone in an affluent area with Google Fiber or whatever can instead of being constrained to whatever my ISP's walled garden has to offer. Hell, you can talk on the phone and use the Internet at the same time, and it doesn't take several minutes to load a single image! (Well... maybe it does for me, since apparently my brothers have been using so much bandwidth that now our ISP is purposely throttling us.)

Having a website is not revolutionary. Making a Geocities-esque landing page that never amounts to being anything other than a placeholder because one got bored with it and abandoned it or a Carrd or Linktree knockoff because one ran out of space for "link in bio" does not help "freedom" or "creativity" at all. A shared hosting company or a VPS provider is not necessarily more freedom-oriented than a social media profile in terms of what can be hosted: the Taliban is apparently allowed on Twitter if they follow the site rules, but several of their websites have been shut down. Some Twitter account somewhere making beautiful art despite the stifling corporate interface they have to use to interact with the site (and even that drawback is mitigated via third-party apps and interfaces) is doing far more to make the Internet a beautiful and fun place than some half-baked cookie-cutter manifesto written by a person who apparently just discovered that their browser can go to websites other than those operated by GAFAM.

There is no need to "revive" the web. It never went away. It never stopped growing. There have always been personal websites and people living outside the zeitgeist of whatever social media site happens to be the most fashionable at the moment. If you're going to proclaim yourself the vanguard of the "internet revolution" or whatever, then act like a leader and lead by example. Put down the savior complex and make something worth spending bandwidth on.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander