Personal websites matter - now, more than ever - because we can see, clearly, with our own eyes, what happens when a handful of companies control and own the medium and the message. It gets silenced, suppressed, and subtly reshaped without us. We get caught up in echo chambers, divided from each other, and force-fed content at the lowest common denominator. And at the end of it all - we get Trump. We get Musk. We get Zuckerberg. We get a pipeline of content slop, pitched as free, costing us everything.
I want a world where finding content is harder. Where it takes a little more work, and where we appreciate what we read, watch, and consume because it didn't come easily.
[..] We can't keep pretending everything is okay. We can't keep pretending the world we have, without personal websites and autonomy and without having a Goddamn say, is an acceptable place for the Internet to end up.
Because it's not.
Source: JoanWesterberg.com (archive) / Noted: 2025 March 3 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth
See also: Indie Web & Personal Sites link collection