The old net ain't gone. Not when I see awesome personal websites like Web 1.0 never totally left, but simply moved forward with what we know, what we learned as of today.
From Space Vixen's 18+ spot to Software Angel's adorable happy place... Nah. We're still here, we don't HAVE to stay stuck to the corpo platforms.
Maybe the most punk thing some of us can do is just exist.
Maybe I should build a personal site too someday. Something that's not just a wiki for another one of my projects.
Hell yeah.
Few things in my twenty years of browsing the internet have been more freeing than building my own site - my summer getaway, my private wizard tower, my secret space station slash strip club - and filling it with things I made and things I love. I don't have to worry about Tumblr flagging my fully-clothed and not even remotely sexual gender experimentation selfies as "inappropriate", or worry about YouTube unplugging my account for making an unmonetized AMV with an Oingo Boingo song in it. Having a personal website is true freedom, and is something I should have made YEARS ago.
And visiting other people's sites? Amazing. It's like going on a trip to a foreign country. It's like visiting someone's town in Animal Crossing and being shocked at how differently it's laid out compared to yours. It's a reminder that we can all be completely unique and beautiful and messy in our own indelible ways.
If that sounds awesome to you, I strongly recommend making a website. You can host one for free over on Neocities, and the site even gives you some helpful pointers on how to write some basic code to make it look the way you want it. HTML is not a terribly difficult language to learn, and it's something you can just work on brick by brick at your own leisure.
It doesn't even have to be a "good" website! Even if you just make a single page with some text about who you are and what you like, maybe some links to your favorite songs or webcomics or your friends' sites, that's all it needs to be. It's a place that YOU carve out for YOURSELF. A place nobody can tell you what to do or who to be.
Tempest is right, the old net ain't gone. But just like it was back in the day, you gotta get out there in the small communities and LOOK for it.
also, i'm working on the back end stuff my webbed site. i'll be chosting about it when it goes live. you know what all of my posts there are not going to have? a like button. i don't care if you like it or not. it's not even for you. it's for ME. ^,..,^