It's approaching the second anniversary of this blog, and nearly a year since I made the switch to hosting it on Wix rather than trying to wrangle hugo and git myself. I thought the change would result in me posting more, but obviously hasn't; my last post was in July, and I haven't even finished migrating all of the stuff from the old blog over to this platform.

When I started this blog, it was my own little resistance gesture toward social media. But since them, the idea of returning to personal blogs, and even older formats of personal websites, has popped up with increasing frequency in the corner of the internet that I inhabit. (This might be the first time in my life that I was on a trend before it made it to the mainstream, though I'm still far behind the actual trendsetters.) It seems many people feel the way that I do about what the internet has turned into, and long for the old days when everyone had their own dumb little website where they put up whatever weird shit appealed to them.

As I listened to very smart people talk about this--I'll link some of my favorites below--a little niggle developed in my brain, telling me that I needed to return to hosting my own site, even if it was a technical pain in my ass. That's part of the point. Platforms like Wix and Squarespace etc make it easy, but they also take the soul out of it. They turn every website into something with about as much personality as a Starbucks.

The other change that's taken place in the past year is that I can't sign in to Wix to update my blog without AI tools all up in my face. The inundation of "AI assistants" is becoming obscene.

Sorry, I have to go on a tangent here: When Melinda Gates (nee French) came up with the idea for Clippy, people fucking hated it and her. Now every stupid program I use has a version of Clippy asking if it can write shit for me, without even the decency of giving me a cute animation. (I don't care what anyone thinks, I enjoyed Clippy's aesthetic.)

I have mixed feelings about AI, particularly LLMs, as a writer and as a human being, and I don't want to get into them, but I hope and believe that this trend of having AI write everything for you is going to die. I'm not saying LLMs are going away, because obviously that genie is out of the bottle, but I think they'll settle into the things they do really well. But I think having an AI middleman between yourself and your audience, be it for an email or a blog post or a job proposal or whatever, is going to always be more trouble than it's worth. When I go to post on my blog, Wix's AI Assistant asks me to tell it what kind of blog post I want to write, so that it can write it for me. I've never used the tool but I've seen enough AI writing to know that I'd have to go back and forth with the stupid bot for many rounds before it actually wrote a decent post, and in that time I could have written and edited my own work three times over.

Tangent concluded. Anyway, the upshot is that I'm returning to hosting my own blog, where I will own all my content in perpetuity, and I don't have any AI assistants trying to interject themselves into my work. I'm also thinking of moving beyond just the basic blog idea, to making what is, somewhat cornily, known as a digital garden--in other words, an old-fashioned collection of random thoughts and stuff I like, which I display publicly for anyone who might be curious.

So the next month or two I'll be working behind the scenes to migrate back. Fortunately all my old content is still on my hard drive, and I'll just have to reformat the handful of posts I made in the past year. I'm committing to actually learning wtf I'm doing this time. This movement has piqued my curiosity, and I want to participate.

If you're interested in the indie web, digital gardens, and resistance to social media, here are some of the things that have been inspiring me.

Pagemelt really got me started on this journey, with their viral video essay "be your own algorithm." I'd already been thinking along these lines, working on curating my own sources of content, so it was very exciting to see someone articulate these ideas in ways that I hadn't yet. I instantly became a Pagemelt stan.

You can check out their neocities page by clicking this awesome 1990s buttons they provided:

(Also join their patreon for their shorter form content, which is also always worth watching.)

Struthless makes great videos, well-researched, intelligent, funny, and charmingly produced. The first half of this video dives into the problems with AI, which is interesting though nothing I hadn't heard before. But the second half is an action plan for resistance, and he has some outstanding suggestions.

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, by Maggie Appleton

Indieweb has instructions on how to set up your own site.

More to come, no doubt, as I explore these ideas.