The biggest problem with people making their own websites is:
1) It's more effort and time than most people are willing to deal with, when instead they can create an account on Bluesky in seconds, and immediately begin sharing their opinions. This means that the slant of opinions from people who make their own websites will inevitably skew more techy.
2) Most people don't view the content they are producing to need a website. It's great if you're writing short or long-form content or obsessed with a particular thing (like the three website examples listed in the article). But for the average Joe, a website feels unnecessary.
I feel like what's missing in this discussion is that as much as I hate Facebook and Twitter (X), they enabled people who otherwise would never have been able to participate in the global discussion to have immediate access to do so. There isn't a good way to parlay that ease of use and immediate connection into individual websites. If all of my friends made their own websites tomorrow, I wouldn't visit them all daily like I read their posts on Mastodon.
Maybe the solution is to accept that most people don't need to be posting their opinions out in the ether? Other than here, I rarely post online.
>After the election, users left the Elon Musk-owned platform in droves, unwilling to centralize the way they talk to people online around this one website.
>...
>Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends.
twitter emigre were fine with centralization of power, suppression of speech, and appeasement of advertisers just a few years ago, back when Ministry of Trust and Safety commissars were on-call 24x7 to suppress speech they didn't like and summarily unperson the offenders.
The idea that social
Media is enabling constrained self expression is interesting - or that people who are illiterate in a literate world have limited self expression.
I feel like what's missing in this discussion is that as much as I hate Facebook and Twitter (X), they enabled people who otherwise would never have been able to participate in the global discussion to have immediate access to do so. There isn't a good way to parlay that ease of use and immediate connection into individual websites. If all of my friends made their own websites tomorrow, I wouldn't visit them all daily like I read their posts on Mastodon.
Maybe the solution is to accept that most people don't need to be posting their opinions out in the ether? Other than here, I rarely post online.
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