This website serves as an ever-evolving experiment of a personal website, trying to see if I can find the right balance between a static site generator and a CMS. It does not serve as a showcase of my best professional-side work, it's just a sandbox of scattered experiments and information, but I try to make a reasonable attempt for it to be useful in some ways.
Modern graphic design trends of flat, soulless, mobile-first layouts has honestly killed a lot creativity, so this serves as a canvas and escape from trying to adhere to those expectations, and may be a little eclectic and chaotic. Therefore, some utilities or pages may not be optimized for viewing on extremely limited screen resolutions.
The web used to be a lot more spread out, chaotic, experimental, and adventurous of a platform, and I hope more folks can come back to rediscovering what originally made the broader web great. The resourcefulness of what you can do now, versus what you could do in say the late-90s/early-00s, is astronomically different, but yet there's very little of independent creativity leaping on this opportunity.
Back then, if you just wanted to put a video on a webpage, you'd have to rely on a scatter of competing browser plugins (that a visitor might not have), just to have a licensed video player, to play a video. The idea of being able to make 3D interactive content entirely in JavaScript would have been completely incomphrensible back then, especially so with anyone being able to build their own video teleconferencing webapp, or whatever people dream up.
Internet Explorer is long dead in the grave, it's no longer holding back progress nor presenting a security risk (by virtually nobody using it now), and we have this expansive landscape to create and be fully independent. But yet, despite video now being native to the web, people still habitually treat YouTube as the only way to publish video content on the web. Despite native support for video streaming and all the server software available, people habitually treat Twitch as the only way to stream. Despite web browser vendors working together on a standard API for video/voice calls (WebRTC), people act as if Discord is the only way to hold a group call.
There is nothing about these platforms that limit you to "only" be able to accomplish those tasks on "only" those select platforms. We're all fully empowered to erect our own websites, platforms, communities—the only cost is a yearly renewal fee for a domain name (typically $12/year; or you can ditch a domain entirely, if you're hosting on Tor or I2P), or at least $5/month for a virtual server you fully control (if you don't want to self-host from your home network). But yet people will pay subscriptions, even as a user, just to have the basic features of HTML be sold back to them—custom emotes, custom backgrounds, etc; often for far more than it'd cost for someone to stand up their own platform for a whole community, with much less restrictions and more permissive upload limits to its members, offered entirely free to its members.
Again, this is not something to just deflect blame and shake a fist at "those evil, greedy corporations!" It's *entirely* on the individual user, of where they choose to spend their time online, and whether they want to explore around and find new things, versus expecting to just sit on one platform in complacency expecting anything interesting to be spoonfed to them.
It's also on community leaders and content creators to make their content available on other platforms. There's always been this bullshit, wilfull misinterpretation of that very statement: where people will argue like you're trying to persuade them to entirely drop their current platform, and only exclusively publish to the alternative instead. That is NOT what's being asked. You could still publish to YouTube AND ALSO be able to publish to other platforms, or even your own website. There are a wide variety of tools for cross-publishing, some platforms may even handle it entirely for you.
There are so many modern-day problems that could easily be solved in regards of invasive data collection, censorship and control, predatory business practices, and plenty more, if users would make a more active choice in where they invest their time online instead. You could either choose a small chat platform that only needs a username and password in order to register; or you could choose the one that also requires your phone number, requires ID verification, put you through CAPTCHAs, try to force you into installing their app, and perpetually store telemetry of every UI element you've clicked/tapped (along with when/where you were, device info/metrics; tagged to EVERY interaction) in the app spanning back to the day you created your account.
It could not be any more stark of a contrast, but this is the environment we've enabled by just going along with the crowd, and staying complacent like a frog in the gradually boiling water. The common counterargument of "network effect" is such a non sequiteur at this point, it's only a crutch and cope that people lean on to feel validated in doubling down and defending why they continue to stick to sitting in boiling water. The average online person has multiple methods to be contacted, there is no singular platform that "everybody's on". Communities exist wherever its members choose to make a home.
When I dropped off Telegram, I've had plenty of friends follow over to XMPP, with some starting their own successful communities there (and on the fediverse as well). If people genuinely have interest in keeping contact with you, they will follow (if you don't make it an overbearing obstacle), or they will still have other methods to still reach you (Steam, SMS, email, or any variety of other things). I originally held onto my Facebook account for several years, in case if a distant family needed to reach me through it; but as it's turned out: that's never happened. They've always had email, phone, or some adjacent relative to contact through, whereas deleting my Facebook account still has not presented any negatives yet for over 10 years now.
I've watched this unrelenting cycle of new platforms reinventing the same thing over and over and over again, all just in a goal of farming the most users they can, then usually selling out when the platform's reached its assumed max valuation, then its decline starts, and people start jumping ship to The Next Big Thing™, of yet another VC-funded startup, and the cycle repeats. I've been through ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger (later Live Messenger), Skype, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Discord, Guilded, Signal, and a scatter of others.
We've had multiple options of standardized open protocols for realtime chat, which have improved and adapted over time, that are still in widespread use, for over a decade now (some for over 2+ decades), it's just a matter of putting preference to building communities atop those established open protocols (XMPP, Matrix, IRCv3, and many more) instead of falling for the bait of The Next Big Thing™ of the next startup that's just another reskin of the same ideas and features that's been beaten to death for beyond 3 decades of the commercial internet.
For social media, we also have a vibrant spread of featureful open protocols, whether it's ActivityPub, Nostr, or other recent contenders. You don't even have to have an account on each option, you often can communicate with people on different servers or protocols, either through federation or bridges, not even having to configure anything different as a user, to communicate with people on different platforms and protocols. There's also newer efforts of making it easier to move your account between platforms (or part of its initial design, like in Nostr), so even a rogue platform operator can't just nuke your online presence on a whim.
Invariably: the solutions are here, and many of them been here and in production use for decades. It's time for the broader internet to break out of this absurd cycle and move on. Even just poking with a personal website can be a great start to seeing how things work and start to give you back autonomy over your online presence and creative control. Stop whining about what content policy changes that YouTube or Twitch have made, or stop using coded speech to get past platform censorship, and actually do something about it as well as support the creators that take the proactive effort to spread out to better options. Otherwise you've entirely fated this all upon yourself, and have only yourself to blame.