I was born in 2003, but I have been an internet user since 2006, a youtuber in 2008, and a website creator since 2016. I have journeyed across the Internet for a very long time.
I want to share some of my thoughts on how I feel about the current state of the internet, how to fight back against the enshitification of the internet, and also provide resources and tools and further reading into the topic.
The internet in its current state is quite frankly fucking terrible to experience. Social media has been made to control our time to produce more money and control our minds through propaganda, all of it to turn us into a dumber more obedient society. I think the majority of us fall victim to it, we are all imperfect beings. I still watch short form content on Instagram as an example, it FEELS nice to just disconnect and consume pointless media.
But even then, I think the majority of us think the way things have been going for the past decade + a couple more years has been all wrong. We continue to lose our online identity to become analytics, and instead of consuming content that has meaning we look towards the closest dopamine creating application.
The system that we all know and hate have almost total control over the narrative when they want it. Was Google and X getting money from the Israeli government to spread disinformation about the famine in Gaza not enough of a sign that these corporations are anti-people that only follow where the money is.
And if you somehow dont care about the rise of fascism across the globe thanks to disinformation supported by these mega tech corporations surely you care about the impact websites have over our climate. For every single thing you view online, it will require electricity from both the server's side, and your side. this tends to carry a Co2 footprint along with it, and can become BIG.
The Dead Internet Theory doesnt carry just some validation, it is a proven objective reality. A major amount of internet traffic belongs to bots. You can go into a youtube comment section right now and you will stumble across a bot fairly quickly if you have a keen eye.
TL;DR: Its capitalism's fault that we have become stuck in the middle of an internet polycrisis. Our human nature of wanting gratification has been made convenient, commercialised, and weaponised. We live in an:
This will be a hard pill to swallow for many people, but we should be striving towards creating our own personal websites again. This either means using Static Site Generators, Raw HTML/CSS, or something like Neocities or WordPress. Taking back control of how you spend your time on the internet, and your online identity, is almost completely necessary if you want to fight against the system.
You are forced to fight for a different system in a society, but you have the option to leave a social media platform and fight against it and culture surrounding it from the comfort of your own website and your community.
I do understand for people fighting against the system that almost everybody is stuck on a social media platform. Organisations and groups have grown dependent on these platforms to maintain member retention and ease of access. But the lack of motion for practical personal change is also why corporations are not afraid to make such offensive changes mentioned earlier. Remember how Twitter went?
If you belong to a community, a forum is easy to set up, phpBB is what I would recommend. But there any plenty of forum creation tools out there that can fit every niche.
And heres a hard pill to swallow for people who are already website makers: Optimise your work, you dont need hundreds of lines of CSS, nor do you need that image to be 5 megabytes. You need to remember that there are millions, even billions of people that have poor internet connection, and if they have to spend more than a megabyte on a single page/blog post, you have failed.
Unless your page/post is specifically about something that requires a lot of data like videos, photography, etc. The message im trying to put across is that accessibility also comes in the form of heavy site optimisation. I'm not trying to discredit people's beautifully made websites, I just worry that we might be making information harder to access for the less fortunate.
But remember, bandwidth isnt the only issue when we are referring to page byte size, we also need to look at the impact it has on climate change, if your page size is tiny it wont produce much emissions, but if you make every single person load an 8mb image on your page, your website will be producing a LOT of emissions.
If you have the option to self host and buy renewable energy or use a datacentre that runs on entirely renewables, please go for that option. But most importantly PLEASE optimise your pages and images.
Breakdown of bytes on this page (11,752 bytes)
With creating your own website, you are able to express exactly how you want to be perceived beyond your wildest dreams without some corporation telling you want you can and cant show (within reason) Take back control of your internet experience.
Coding doesnt have to be a chore, and while you should have realistic boundaries for what you can do, dont hold back your creativity. If you go onto Neocities you can look at other people's personal websites and see how crazy they make their pages. You can even inspect the code they made to see how they did it. I encourage you to look at the source of this website to see and take what you want.
If you're struggling with making your website look good, you can always look towards CSS templates, or copy the code of a Perfect Motherfucking Website.
Fun Fact: My CSS file is a heavily modified version of this website's stylesheet!
And so, this is what a website looks like, MY website, more or less. While I have been doing this for ~10 years, my programming skills very slowly progressed past the first year, what changed was my brain's maturity, my design philosophy, interest in accessibility, and my need to learn more about web 1.0 practices. you dont need to do half of what I did to do the minimum.
I was like 11-12 when I started making websites, It's not as hard as you think it is, inspect any of my pages. and you ARE expected to use documentation, I still do.
Creating your own personal website is revolutionary. The less grasp these corporations have on you, the more powerful and independent you are.
Further Reading - These people are way better at explaining things.
Useful Resources & Tools - If you want to make a website, check these out.
The contents within the website are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Please feel free to take the site's code and use it for your own project.