I’m a little too young to have really appreciated the pre-Web 2.0 internet. Me and my cousin had our own Tripod sites when we were kids but we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Then we got a little older and MySpace came out. It was like having your own little stripped down website but some guy named Tom hosted all of your data. You could customize some things with html but it was more locked down than actually hosting something on your own.

What it did have was an easy to navigate network of people. Instead of RSS feeds and email, you could add friends to your page for easy access and you could even leave comments on each other’s profiles.

Then along came Big Social™ in 31 different flavors - from Facebook to Tumblr and beyond.

Instead of having one central hub for your posts, links you find interesting and anything else you want to share, you had to build separate networks of friends on each different platform. As time went on, they started stripping away customization and started tracking you like you’re on the FBI’s most wanted list. It’s convenient and requires zero technical knowhow to adopt a massive centralized social network as your online home, but it’s definitely a compromise.

Our capitalist society tricked us into thinking the only reason to have a website is to run a business. Go to any web host and all of their internal advertising is focused on SEO, running ad campaigns and growing your business to increase your bottom line.

That’s fucking goofy.

I started a blog because I’m not that comfortable on big social networks. There’s an implied tone and way to do things. People act differently on Facebook than they do on Twitter. People on Tumblr have an entirely different vibe than people on Reddit. It feels like you need to have multiple personalities to fit in everywhere.

Since I started blogging, something pretty cool has started to happen. Instead of a public comment thread with likes and retweets, I’ll get random emails from people who read my posts. That’s another thing enshittification has tricked us into thinking - that email is just a tool for business. If you’re a company, you use it to advertise. The rest of us use it like a physical mailbox. It’s a place where 99% of what you receive is junk mail and the other 1% is probably newsletters and account activation links. If you want to talk to someone, you do it through SMS or Facebook Messenger.

But the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting all these emails and I’ve been replying to other people’s blog posts by email, too. It’s the original messenger, and you can use it no matter what platform you’re on. I never looked at it that way until now.

Same with RSS! Instead of paying a monthly subscription to Apple News+ or relying on Twitter feeds, I curate my own feed of blogs and websites I like. If I don’t want to see sports and stock market updates every time I refresh the page, I don’t have to. I can use whatever client I want. I can even host my own client like FreshRSS and have total control over how I consume news.

All the tools are there. With a cheap hosting plan, you can run a blog, your own cloud storage, a powerful rss client and your own email at your own domain. You can message anyone who has email and subscribe to any website that has a newsfeed. You could even run your own Mastodon instance and have total control of your social life on a more traditional social media platform if you want.

It’s funny how history rhymes. I think this is the kind of stuff that made the internet feel so limitless when it was new. I’m glad there’s at least a small community where it’s coming back around. Or maybe it never actually left and it’s just new to me. Either way I’m here and I’m enjoying my stay.