Every person on the planet should have their own website
Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want.
I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name because it contained some cringe ass shit that’s still visible on archive.org. But that’s not the point, at least I was playing around, unrestricted. I registered a domain name with shared hosting.
Everyone should be writing in public. It may be about work, family, a lifelong obsession with a certain subject, random observations, photo albums, music you produced, your favorite quotes, etc.
It will be safely kept in archive.org for your ancestors to investigate and ponder on.
And they will. Even if most of your future offspring are normies, at some point, it’s nearly guaranteed that someone will discover your old blog and share it with the family.
“Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!”
Now imagine if you had access to interesting details about your great-grandmother’s sister, or brother, or whatever. Wouldn’t you want to, at least for once, look into, and share the highlights with your family?
July 6, 2023
I wrote this also in the 90’s when I started my own site and my own blog as one of the first blogs.
But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so).
– you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever
– you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is
– in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions
– you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions)
– there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing
So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone
This form reminds me of the one I built with PHP, MySQL, CSS and HTML that I learnt in my first year of B.E.
Nice!
I don’t know if this is serious or not or both, but what about privacy? Also, why should everyone be really doing any one thing? Only Sith deal in absolutes – and so do Jedi 🙂
Truth of the matter is that not everyone wants to write and share their lives with the world. It’s cool that you did and enjoyed it – so did I for that matter. But IRL > Online – at least for the time being.
There’s another problem, which is there’s no guarantee at all that this data will survive. For example, remember what happened to Geocities? Poof, gone. Even archive.org might not last – I’ve seen an article somewhere that it may shutdown. And who knows which direction the Internet will take in the near future. Even personal websites are a thing of the past. A joyous nostalgic thing, but still a bygone.
If anyone wants to leave anything behind for their ancestors, I actually think hard copies are still the best option. I mean, how many times has someone cleaned up some attic after their grandmother died and found all kinds of letters, old photos, and other treasures? Or maybe a hybrid approach of having some kind of online and offline vault of data? That might be interesting. I would still bet my money that the hard copies would outlast the online version. I mean, what if someone kept floppy disks or CD-Rs for future generations? Even today it’s hard to get a hold of a device that reads this data, it’s a real archiving problem.
Conclusion: print the contents of that blog and keep it up in the attic 🙂
I really like this idea. Problem is most people aren’t technically inclined enough to get a domain name and attach it to their blog, or do any kind of styling. WordPress exists and other blog software such as Bearblog, but that’s pretty limited.
Also not sure that the Internet Archive will still be around when I am 70. I dearly hope that it is, but no service lasts forever.
I agree though, most people need a blog. Why allow big tech to dominate what people can or cannot say. The problem with alternative social media sites is that the alt-right flocks to them, so individual blogs are the best way IMO to have a say without social media influence while also not needing to be associated with nazis
Totally agree! I’m a Dutch guy born in the 80’s, doing webdev since the 90’s, and I have a hard time fathoming how people don’t see that domain+email+website for everybody IS ALREADY social media. Sprinkle in some RSS and you’re good to go!
Nice blog by the way. Just subscribed to your RSS feed.
strongly agree
I wonder:
Is it the the case that, any assertion containing the phrase “Every person on the planet should” do X, especially when couched as ‘because I do X, everyone should’ is always wrong?
If people were to move all content from all the social networks that they used before, into their home-sites, they would become individually much more relevant as information sources than they are now.
An open source software that enables to easily pull one’s own data from the various other systems into one’s home database could be created, and one’s home-sites could be used to give access to that data based on visitor parameters, authentication identities, etc., giving a lot of flexibility…
Hi,
For many years, since I was 15, I hoped to get my domain, without luck, because there was no way to get free domain, and I had no secure mean to pay for it.
Now, I’m 38. Still dreaming to get my own domain name.
Not sure if you consider us who still lives in developing countries as “person on the planet”, but we do not have such a privilege.
There are some pretty cheap ones. On namecheap you can get a .xyz domain for like 2 USD starting, or 9.98 for two years. That + a free hosting company like github.io or netlify make it pretty easy to get set up with a site.
Even if you can’t afford any domain you can still have a personal site for free. Neocities lets you build one, complete with a browser IDE for completely free. It will just be something like hooh.neocities.org or something like that instead of something fancy like hooh.com
Blogging for a long time, and loving it. It is a tool for growth and your personal garden 🙂
Good idea.
Any thoughts about how people are going to find these sites?
I agree, I’ve been running my own “boutique” domain since 1996
THE TRASH ON THE INTERNET IS ENOUGH, PLEASE STOP MAKING MORE.
It’s an interesting phenomenon that everyone’s memories on the internet are stored in large buildings, under the water, in canyons, in caves and more. They are data center. But we never see them.
For our memory is true, we need to have a space like a own website to place our memories.