→ The SNS Model Is Failing: Why You Should Make A Website
- Instagram culls new profiles by removing the "recent posts" tag filters and replacing it with "top recent posts".
- Twitter's enshittification was so bad that its reputation along with its revenue got topped and dropped by and under Elon Musk's reign. Ragebait is particularly a profitable meta on Twitter and in result, any sort of relevant feed to you gets lost in history and AI generative images by collateral.
- Even Google has become hard to navigate; you can't even look up an image of a video game character without coming across disfigured generative slop of their former selves.
- In 2025, the blend of private and public sectors has never been clearer as Meta goes MAGA when Mark and Musk join forces with American President Trump in totally gutting the constitution. Not just that, but Tiktok issues a country-wide memo praising Trump for reversing its US ban not even a day later (even though he was the one who put it in order in the first place...)
If you can believe it, your online platform has been declining since and it's nothing new. Where a few pixels free of white space glaze the screen rests ad and clutter instead of something actually useful. In the blooming forever-period of the unregulated Capital Web, the user focus has now shifted onto the service's slick branding rather than the poison they keep feeding to you.
Online strangers have never been more strange and apart, and you can feel yourself feeling more defensive than you were last year in your internet usage. What you're viewing is a form of platform decay.
What Makes Online Communities So Hard To Relate To
I'm not really sure how much of nostalgia is shaping my recollection of things, though I was part of a generation who's witnessed the shift from the "The Wild Web 2.0" to Metaverse scraps. I recall a period when internet culture was much more sincere and nerdy (though it could be because I only talked to sincere and nerdy people.) You could parse trolls (or proto-ragebaiters for the youth) if you valued your time, but otherwise the internet was just spread out just enough that there was something for everyone.
When social networking became a priority over all things online, people's attitudes became more ironic and impatient as 2016 approached and social commentary Youtubers found profit turning real life people into one big observational comedy. People didn't take people so seriously, and it bred feelings of paranoia and isolation. Despite the negative reaction, schadenfreude media on Youtube is still relevant.
The effects are still present as some sort of world-scale Post Traumatic Stress phenomena; people get insulted when you dare ask clarification on a post of theirs because now you are antagonizing someone on a hot issue that everyone should know. It's not their job to teach you such an obvious subject, and maybe you should've seen their last post instead of asking them such a stupid question and making them repeat themselves. Stop me if you've heard this one.
SNS environments indirectly taught us to spot an outsider before they even get the chance to become an outsider by weaponizing communication, the very thing that made the internet so novel. When did social networking become so... un-social?
Eventually, our online successors won't even care for online preservation. We didn't either, as we let children's MMOs breathe their last breath and remaining forum regulars congregated to the Next Thing. Our complacency forever doomed online users into a position of consuming until the net overconsumes itself into an interbred content farm of things we've already seen before.
So. What's happening? Where do we go from here?
From A Designer's Perspective
I've been webmastering for a good chunk of 6 years as I thought learning a little code was a good transferrable skill to have as an artist. When I first dipped my toes into web development, I distinctly felt like I actually held a part of the space I've picked and played with. I've been proven with technical viscera of brackets and code of my quaint static website that I finally owned something that wasn't written in the lustful image of online monopolies. Those who never worked with any sort of webstack miss a whole perspective of the online control that these social media services don't give you. In fact, they're not user-unfriendly, they're designed to be user-hostile.
All major social media platforms structure the basic user profile once described by web archivist Kyle Drake as a "Stasi apartment building". After all the rave and FOMO you've endured hearing about this spanking brand-new platform your peers are using, you eventually sign up and they give you a customizable icon, a customizable banner, and a customizable microbiography and push you to the sandbox.
And you figure that's all you really need to express yourself. I don't really hate the less-is-more model because as a creator you'd want to place your content where the reader can find it with little resistance as possible; why complicate the walk between the eye to the visual?
My contention lies at how blank a page can be until we truly have control. You don't necessarily have to scrap personality to have a sleek and accessible page. Visual design plays a great deal at speaking the unspoken in ways that text can't. When you remove the blocks an artist needs to relay a message, you extinguish a language altogether: the first sign of corporate rot. These stagnant block profiles may serve a "one-size-fits-all" appeal for casual consumers, but they're solely designed in the favor of the holder so that you as the user seek the shoddy solution they've prepared.
The floor and ceiling are only a few inches apart in terms of how much you can really tap into your identity, and your page is designed only with easier serverside moderation in mind. Even if you wanted to offset the formula a little and make your page a sweet
Reframing Internet Usage
It's unrealistic to expect everyone to fully disconnect from social media as a whole. Online presence is now a must-have just to live. In such ways its forced the internet to mirror our real identities; our jobs, our schools, our local communities. Freelancers especially need the cancerous-spread nature of Tw*tter to get any worth of their business. My friends over at "The Old Web" may poke a little fun at Tw*tter migrants, but the last thing I'd want to do is antagonize those who are simply playing The Game as they've been introduced to it as.
Ideally "The Internet" is a navigational instrument. It's directionless, because it was never a place to begin with. Websites don't need to compete in a monopoly for The One Hub, and they certainly don't need another paywall or another subscription.
It's up to you to decide what you give and what you take from the internet, but would you let a corporation tell you what your limits are? Do your most philosophical moments have word limits or marketability? The moment you let corporations define the framework of your content, you've turned your human experience into the pill-sized bite that the human experience is anything but: a product.
→ Getting Started With Decentralizing
Webhosting
- Github Pages: Solid free host for static websites. What sets it apart from Neocities is git control.
- Neocities: Free webhosting service. Updates using the online editor. An okay gateway for those coming from SNS wanting to learn how to code HTML/CSS through the small community that comes with it.
- NekoWeb: I never used it but it seems like a fork of Neocities with emphasis on in-community decoration.
Design Guides
- 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People: This book goes into the psychology of your average reader. Good for those trying to create easy-to-read UI, bad for those who are fascinated with The Old Web aesthetic. In the latter case, ignore it.
Finding Community
- Reddit: Unironically Reddit is an okay forum site. You can curate your feed better than any other network of its size.
- Newgrounds: Aside its spotty legacy, Newgrounds has always stuck to its "everything by everyone," slogan and artists/composers/programmers have the equal opportunity to feature on the front page whether you're a new user or a regular.
- Webring List: Alternatively web rings are a group of websites centered around one theme and while its kind of a primitive format with caveats, its the best way to find niche sites in ways you can't with a search engine.
