Keep the Internet Funky

I have been thinking a lot lately about how much of the internet has disappeared behind walls. Some of those walls are literal login screens. Others are apps, private communities, algorithmic feeds, paywalls, platforms that refuse to let search engines see what people publish, and social networks where the only practical way to participate is to join somebody else's system. We are creating an enormous amount of writing, art, conversation, knowledge and history, but increasingly we are putting it into places that the rest of the web cannot reach.

I don't think that is what made the internet special.

The internet itself came from several different goals, including connecting computers and sharing resources between networks. The web that grew on top of it gave us something even more interesting: a simple way for anybody to publish something and link it to something somebody else published. You didn't need permission from a platform. You didn't need to belong to the same service. You needed a server, a document and a URL. That still feels kind of miraculous to me.

The web and the networks that came before it have been part of my life since grade school. I started on an Apple II in class, got into phone freaking in middle school, ran my own BBS in 1988, and was on dial-up before anyone called what we were doing the internet. In high school in the early nineties I worked for my dad programming and building computers. I connected machines, experimented, talked to people I never would have met otherwise and discovered information I probably never would have encountered through the world immediately around me. Those systems were small compared with what came later, but they felt enormous from the inside.

Every connection led somewhere. Someone had a BBS. Someone else had a file collection. Someone knew about a programming language I had never used. Someone had figured out how to make a piece of hardware do something it wasn't really intended to do. You followed phone numbers, links, recommendations and eventually hyperlinks from one person's little corner of the network into somebody else's.

That wandering changed my life. I learned because people shared what they knew. I met people because somebody made themselves reachable. I found opportunities because information moved between communities that otherwise never would have touched. A surprising number of the relationships and experiences that shaped my career started because somebody, somewhere, decided to put something on a network where another curious person could find it. I want us to keep doing that.

Your website is your little piece of the internet

I still think the best place to put something you care about is your own website. That doesn't mean everyone needs to become a systems administrator. Hosting a website can be almost absurdly easy now. It also doesn't mean social networks are useless. I use them. They are good places to find people, have conversations and let others know that something exists. I just don't want the platform to be the only place the thing exists.

If you write something you care about, put it on your site. If you make art, give it a home on your site. If you discover something interesting, link to it. If you build something weird, document it. If you learn how to solve a problem that took you three days to figure out, write down the solution so the next person can find it in ten minutes. Then share the link wherever people happen to gather.

That order matters to me. Publish first on the place you control, then let the networks point back to it.

A personal website is one of the few places on the modern internet where you can still decide almost everything. You decide what it looks like. You decide how it is organized. You decide whether something deserves to stay online for twenty years. You decide what you link to. You decide what weird little experiment belongs in a forgotten corner of the site. Nobody has to approve it. Nobody needs to decide whether it is engaging enough for the feed. It can just exist because you wanted it to exist. That freedom is important.

The weird parts are the best parts

I don't want every website to look like a product. Some of my favorite things on the web are sites that clearly came out of one person's brain and could not possibly have survived a product planning meeting: strange navigation, unnecessary animations, personal collections, tiny games, digital gardens, hand-drawn graphics, pages about extremely specific hobbies, long essays about something the author cannot stop thinking about, directories maintained because one person believes those links deserve to exist, and a page at /friends because somebody thought we should start telling our friends that they matter.

That stuff is the web, or at least it is the web I want more of. There is a reason I have been spending so much time wandering around independent websites again. They remind me that a website can be an expression of a person rather than the endpoint of a conversion funnel. It can be art.

I think of my own site that way more and more. It contains writing, projects, experiments, things I am reading, places I have wandered and pieces of my life that I want to remember. Some of it is useful. Some of it is probably only interesting to me. Some of it exists because I thought it would be funny. That's fine. It is mine.

Walled gardens make the world smaller

The problem with putting everything inside closed platforms isn't only ownership. It is discovery. A link can travel anywhere. A public web page can be referenced by another site, indexed by a search engine, archived, quoted, added to a feed, discovered ten years later or stumbled across by someone following a completely unrelated chain of links. Closed systems interrupt that.

Sometimes you cannot see the content without an account. Sometimes automated tools are blocked entirely. Sometimes the URL barely represents the thing you were looking at. Sometimes the platform disappears and takes years of people's work with it. Even when the content remains technically public, it can become practically invisible outside the network that owns it. That is a loss.

The web becomes more useful when information can move between communities. It becomes more resilient when no single company gets to decide whether that information continues to exist. It becomes more interesting when discovery involves following people instead of merely following algorithms. I don't want to lose that.

We can actually do something about it

The nice thing is that this isn't one of those enormous internet problems where the only possible solutions require Congress, standards bodies and several trillion dollars. You can make a website. You can link to somebody else's website. You can start a blogroll. You can publish an RSS feed. You can archive things. You can participate in the IndieWeb. You can put your projects somewhere that doesn't require an account to view them. You can tell someone whose work you appreciate that you appreciate it. You can make one strange little page that exists for no reason other than it made you smile. Enough people doing small things is how the web became interesting in the first place.

I have spent most of my life learning things and meeting people through networks other people built. I owe an enormous part of my life and career to people who shared knowledge freely enough that some kid poking around on a computer could eventually find it. I want to return the favor. Put your thoughts somewhere we can find them. Link generously. Keep the doors open. Build weird things. Make knowledge free. Keep disco evil. And keep the internet funky.