Why Personal Websites Die

Finding some random website full of interesting information or fun links is HYPE. It feels that you explore an unknown world! Even better when you consoom its contents and it sends you to more sites!
An organic network. No algorithms redirecting you, but real people (wow, innovating!)


Let me now state and defend a controversial statement:


The majority of people will NEVER have their own website, even if buying a domain, VPS, and hosting was free


Why does the average person get a website?

  1. Communication (email)
  2. Showing his credentials/achievements to a possible employer/hirer (portfolio)

1. Email is outdated. Just setting a GPG key setup is too much for all normies naturally repulsed by the terminal
"M-M-Muh XMPP!"
kek get real


2. Portfolio is interesting. I think personalizing the visualization of your portfolio has more potential of great impressions than a plain pdf. But it's very hard to tailor-make your website to fit your specific portfolio.
The average person will do common UI mistakes, so I wouldn't be fond of reading personalized portfolios, when I could read a default pdf instead.

But my point is it's bloated. You want a job, you send your portfolio.pdf physically or digitally. If you place your skills and "I am looking for a job" on your website, there is no way some1 will hire you without any marketing presence to even find that hidden page (which likely means you don't need a job at that point)


Now, let me return to the controversial statement. Personal websites allow for the most direct way of connecting to those who enjoy your works, without patreon or other parasitic middlemen. But here is the problem. Today's average person is not creative. He will not feel like posting anything meaningful online. And worse, maintaining a website? Updating RSS, such horror, so difficult!


Even if you suddenly made a website for everyone (so everyone owned a website without their consent) most people would just not use it, it would be empty. To preserve visitors with a website itself, you must constantly update it, and your average person just won't put that much effort (for a variety of reasons)
Yes, everyone can become a landchad, but not everyone can vitalize his landchad gains.


"u r blackpillin plz stop"

Not a blackpill if you read this to the end. But here is another fact, which seals the above:
Have you seen how many dead links exist on decentralized websites? Pulling numbers out of aether, I could argue 95% of websites ever made are dead. That is horror.
A digital graveyard is most dreadful of all graveyards. There are no corpses, no proof of existence. They were created, unnoticed, and were abandoned silently by their very creator. Do you know why?
The creator makes a website as they are temporarily hyped, then forget about it, or simply have nothing interesting to upload.


Let me give you a personal example. I claimed yellowarchitect.xyz in 2020, and I made it to help in decentralizing the internet and enhancing my privacy. Personal email was the hype. But I didn't use it. All my communication was talking to close friends with Element (XMPP is bloated, use Tox if you want peak privacy)
Using my new email, I must have sent in total around 5 random emails, but nothing serious as I was a brainlet and had issues with GPG keys, so I refrained from sending wall-of-text emails to based randoms

I remember I emailed an indian with a minimalistic personal website, to help me integrate GPG encryption to my emails. Some days after, before I got an answer, my VPS (which hosted my website and email) had expired and I had to renew it! But I honestly didn't even bother, as I generally got no emails, sent no emails, still kept talking with my friends with the old good setup, so I thought "cool, I gain 5$ per month now"
To see that indian guy's website also 404 a few months after, was the icing on the cake. He, along thousands who made a website, must have noticed this too. That his time wasn't worth updating the website.


"Who benefits from becoming a Landchad?"


  1. Creative people who seek an outlet. tl;dr: Hobbyists

    Personal Websites being HTML, obviously favour writers and programmers.
    Thus far, I have encountered only 5 blogs whose writings were hype to read, yet weren't part of their fulltime income.


  2. Those who seek to make a website to promote something they do fulltime.

    A classic example is a videogame or company, having its own website.
    My example works too. I write a lot. Writing logic, writing game designs, writing my own books etc etc
    Knowing I will have my own website, I expanded my love for writing in yet another way.

    The original reason I made the website was the game library, which took off the burden of having wasted too much time on videogames.
    Saying "I have finished 400 videogames" doesn't feel bad now, but good. Sharing my knowledge and helping others find enjoyable videogames, is obviously better than merely improving my game design skill. Then I realized making this game library, I would also get an email which I would actually use this time, then realized I need more content so the game-library is not the home page -_-


    Of course, you will find a webpage being helpful for promoting your fulltime occupation, in many other examples too. The most common example, is establishing yourself as a video-creator fulltime, and then making a website instead of relying on patreon-like services. In this way, you put things on your website not intended for the main audience (e.g. "behind the scenes" walls of text)
    Fine examples are Luke Smith and Sseth Tzeentach.


    Hosting your own website obviously means you are harder to censor, as you can publicly display what happened on your website, and the above 2 examples are literally untouchable as they host videos on multiple video platforms.


Webpins will never revive

You must have seen this kind of boxes at the bottom of a webpage.

They are literally the OG advertisements. Why? Because they take away the attention with their flashy colors and motion, and often contrast the webpage's visual themes. Placing even 3 of them next to each other results in visual chaos, and ofc, they make the entire website look shitty and low-quality.
Why were they even used? For networking effect obviously, it was websites that the webpage creator enjoyed and recommended. But like forced advertisements this is the wrong way!


The best way for networking the visitor is having a dedicated links webpage for those interested, e.g.

And of course, hyperlinking to other webpages when its relevant to your creation (see the plethora of smoothly fitting hyperlinks in this post)



Landchad Paradise - The Ideal Internet

Neocities is interesting. Everyone can make a website and not pay money. There are a lot of creative sites, far more than I expected.
Why don't all people use neocities?
It is because of perception.


https://theyellowarchitect.com is "cooler" than https://theyellowarchitect.neocities.org
It just looks weird. It looks like I am a user to some social media platform, because users "share" the same website.
Also, you aren't really your own host.


The main problem of personal websites dying is related to hosting and data protocols (tfw Hypercore isn't mainstream) Having a universal communication tool (email) without privacy bloat (GPG keys being integrated by default) and modern expression support (memespeak, custom emojis etc etc), would ensure all communication is decentralized and untouchable even by goverments.
No chat platform hopping either (skype/facebook/twitter/telegram/discord/element/xmpp), so everyone would jump on it once and for all. It would be as adopted as the mobile phone.
With the protocol of ActivityPub, the foundation is there.
But it will take years - decentralized chat clients don't even have custom emojis!


The ideal internet, would look approximately like this:


A proper Universal communication tool (to be hosted on a domain with 1 button to setup), and hosting to be unrelated to your bank account, would make the internet better than even its past golden age.
To make it more hype, add an open-source tool which auto-generates complicated websites without writing any code (see visual programming or modding tools), taking advantage of the open-source nature of websites, by importing any website as templates POG


A bizzare thought experiment

If all personal websites were hosted on neocities, yet to enter you had to type normal .com addresses via default browser integration, a lot of people wouldn't notice at all.
So, the idea of EVERYONE being a landchad is not impossible. But it would require goverments or huge organizations pushing people to make their own websites by buying up servers to hand them to citizens.
I don't think you want that. All personal websites would become meta-facebook, with every citizen linked to a website via their hosting server, snooping their data. And personal websites would obviously lose their soul, as the majority would be mediocre. Think of myspace, but its the entire internet. All the while having all browsers forcefully integrating the new DNS changes...


Yeah, I prefer current internet, thank you very much. There are plenty of creative people remaining, they just aren't easy to find them and their creations. But it's possible. Bless hyperlinks, Bless RSS