why did i make this website? there's a lot of reasons. tl;dr: i am discontent with the current state of the internet, and i believe in the potential it has to become a better place. lemme explain:
"we cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them."
— jaron lanier, 'how we need to remake the internet', ted talk, 2018.
we, the users, used to own the internet, but that's not the case anymore. big tech (aka conglomerates like google and meta) has had an unprecedented growth in the last 20 years, and their different products and platforms have made the internet more accesible than ever before. everyone, from a tecnologically averse grandma to a literal toddler, can connect to the world wide web (or the WWW, for the sake of simplicity) from their laptops, phones, watches and even from their home appliances. as the current digital landscape only grows and incrusts itself onto society, the influcence of big tech becomes evermore present. it is practically impossible to browse the web without connecting to either a google or an amazon web service, and the benefits of this for the overarching state of the WWW seem to be smaller by the day.
corporations are not charities, they need to make a profit somehow. in this present landscape it is not enough to generate revenue, as the goal is to grow, and since we do noy pay for these platforms, they are not made for us and our well-being. it is the owners of the WWW (our owners, i would say) who get to reap what we sow while using these platforms and creating the content. "if a product is free then you are the product" is an adage that sounds as old as time nowadays, and it can't be closer to the truth. the current over-commercialization of the internet (and the commodification of human interaction as a by-product) has too many ethical and moral ramifications, and to detail them all is outside of the scope of this essay. for now, i will try to focus on how this affects our user experience on the daily.
since we no longer own our digital spaces, we cannot choose what we consume there anymore. the information is not found, but given to us; the tech moguls of today have put an algorithmic system in place that, for many, seems to do the job. the curation, on a superficial level, is very good, and scrolling on short-form content focused platform is part of everyone's day now. hell, it's part of mine too! i jump on instagram every other day to see what my friends are up to, it's very easy to connect with them this way. everyone is on these platforms, and to withdraw from them is to know you will be missing out on certain cultural discourse, even on real life. (a pseudo-monopoly on social interactions? maybe it's a dilemma to tackle in a future post...) the automatic curation was not created as a gift to us, though: as everything that permeates these social media platforms, those who benefit the most are not the day-to-day users.
it is a secret to nobody that these curation systems make us stay more time inside social media. the algorithm is addictive, some even claim! every second we scroll is counted as more engagement on our part, and this is the metric used to measure the attention we give to each piece of content. all the data given to the algorithm (conciously and subconciously) is used to fine-tune our feeds. this business is so efective that data has become an extremely valuable resource: it is the new oil, the gold of our current times.
there's three big problems with this:
negative emotions are easier to produce than positive ones, so it's more effective to produce content that elicits anger and misery because it generates more engagement. our brain loves drama, for good and for bad, and this generates a loop where we stay inside these platforms; our monkey DNA craves for these bursts of dopamine and cortisol. this obviously has detrimental effects on our moods.
this data, in the wrong hands, can be used to modify our behavior. this, at best, makes us vulnerable targets to predatory marketing and advertising. in the worst cases, it helps propagandists in their mission of pushing dangerous misinformation onto the public, and even to incite political violence.
since the algorithm favors quantity over quality, the feed is mostly filled with low quality content. this has reached a new peak after the creation of generative AI tools: AI slop is faster to produce, and users are bombarded with content that is neither informative, significant or even entertaining.
the owners of these platforms claim to care, but things seem to get worse by the day. these three things are profitable, so they don't regulate themselves to mitigate the damage. the stocks go up and the platforms get worse, but we are too busy with life to find alternatives. most of our acquaintances are there, so why bother?
and even with all this, i find the most dangerous problem to be an existential one. what are we, as humans? what makes us want to connect with each other?
corporations sallivate at the thought of understanding us better than we understand ourselves. the algorithm tries to psychoanalyze us with the goal of creating millions of thorough profiles, distilling our wants, our needs and our whole human experiences into simple data. into one and zeroes. we fall into the trap, too; we have been conditioned to see human identities as a tangible, quantifiable thing that we can control. we all have wondered how our instagram feed looks to potential followers. we don't cherish some of our group photos because "we didn't get our best angle", and that would hurt our "aesthethic". have you ever entertained the question "what is my personal brand"?
websites, then, have become the perfect marketing tool for big tech. a monstrous publicity machine that eats us up, processing our bones to generate a facsimile of our personality and essence. then it shows us the holy grail, disguised as an ad; bottomless pits of content that vie to make us react how the owners want. we shouldn't ask for more, the tech moguls think. the doomscroll will save us (and persuade us to buy something in the process). long-form content will make us ponder, and that cannot be monetized (long live short-form content!). the personal brand has become our identity, our mirrors no longer exist. creating a profile on social media or dating apps feels like waiting to be bought.
still, i do think their goal is unachievable. the system seems to be working at first glance, and the advancements in the AI field seem to strengthen the tech dystopia we are living in. yet we will prevail, because the human condition is so complex and multilayered that it cannot be understood in its fullest. philosophers, scientists and academic have tried for milennia, but we are no closer to the "truth". our identities are a mystery, even to ourselves; we are everchanging people, and in the moment we understand a facet of our personality, it has already changed completely. we are an amalgamation of environments, relationships and dreams that grows like clouds. an algorithm can only understand ones and zeroes, but we are so much more than that.
we cannot let ourselves be defined by the content we consume, it would be akin to betraying our humanity. yet big tech will keep trying; their business is up and running still. i think we can create things that cannot be constrained by the design of their platforms, though. we can create things that will last, things that are closer to what we are.
"the image is in crisis. it has neven been harder for an image to mean anything. they don't compel us. they did once, many of us remember. when they did, they looked like this."
— noah jordan, 'the return to early visual aesthetics', welcome.jpeg journal, 2025.
i think i speak for everyone when i claim there is something missing on the internet nowadays. anyone who surfed the WWW in the late 2000's (and the decade before that) reminisce about the sense of wonder they experienced back then, when exploring the internet was akin to get lost inside a vast, confusing labyrinth. every website felt unique, and in a single evening of browsing you could find anything and everything.
a multitude of personal homepages, sites with fun facts about plants, fanfiction of your favorite TV show, forums for car enthusiats, blogs with free music for you to download, shrines for the user's deceased cat, family albums, tutorials for anything you could think of, and even whole-ass novels presented through a link per page (read hypertext fiction); all awaiting for you a click away. or two. or three. or thirty!
if you allow me to make an analogy: it was like walking through a cosy village with hundreds of branching roads, every uniquely-colored house filled with pets, the owners willing to let you in and have a chat over some tea. nowadays, the digital experience is akin to sitting inside a crowded mall, every visitor angrily screaming at each other because X singer is better than Y singer, and because the friend of the cousin of your neighbor dumped the mother of the sister of your other neighbor, and also because the weather was just shitty that day. everything while sleazy salesmen are whispering on your ear begging you to buy their new something.
and it is not only the low-quality repetitive content that enshittified platforms like twitter, instagram, tiktok, et al; their monotonous, non-customizable designs play a big part on producing this feeling of alienation too. every single page looks the same, and it is not hard to prejudge someone's comment or post in an environment that moves way too fast. choosing your profile picture and your banner feel less like decorating your house and more like putting yourself into the store shelves of this mall.
the internet was a place, and not an extension of reality. everyone had their beautiful little corner, decorated to their liking and filled with the content that mattered the most to them. mainstream social media does not allow you to create a place that's truly yours, and i think this is what's missing the most from the internet today. we humans have a need to express ourselves, and the old web allowed us to leave a mark on the digital landscape. it allowed us to truly be seen.
the WWW was a giant mural, html was the canvas and css the oil paint: the colors you chose and the composition of every element told things about you. the long posts and their formatting painted a picture of your life, each section of your site being a new brushstroke on the mural. it was an artform, every webpage and every blog was a piece of art in itself.
the biggest example i can provide to illustrate my argument is melonking's website. it is the place that inspired me to create my website in the first place (and i'm sure many of the members of the web revival community can say the same!!!). browing it is an entire experience in itself; the playful layout, with its big colored buttons and surreal gif animations, reminds one of the geocities aesthetic of the 90s (maybe the closest representation of it, aesthetically speaking). yet the vast amount of content and the interactivity gives the website a complexity more comparable to that of a graphic adventure game. there's even secret webpages for you to find! i can even compare it to those weird avant-garde exploration videogames, like yume nikki. it is a real place, and without the sitemap you could easily get lost.
melonking's home could not exist inside tiktok or twitter. it is too complex, too human for that. exploring it requires a time investment, an effort, and you might exit the website as a different person (which is what good art should do). the platforms and websites we visit nowadays have the exact same look and feel; sanitized design that do not represent any of us in the slightest. facebook groups and youtube channels are the closest things to real community i've found in the public internet, yet the slick fonts and responsive layouts of the platforms they are hosted on remind me that every member is a product to be sold. and with that, the negatives come.
so instead of trying to find kinship in these crowded malls, why don't we make our own websites and invite our guests for tea?
"where do you want to go today?"
— microsoft, windows 95's advertising campaign, 1994-1999.
there's lots of social media platforms that try to escape the attentional algorithmic machine, either by establishing new paradigms or by trying to reimplement what worked before the enshittification began. the only valid excuse i can find for staying on mainstream social media, as opposed to moving to these alt-platforms (how i will call them in this post), is the userbase. it's true that literally everyone is in instagram! u.u still, i will list some of them because i find their approaches to be truly valuable in the battle against big tech:
bluesky, mastodon and the fediverse: these are a collection of platforms that implement new decentralized open protocols, allowing users to host their own instances of the app. e.g.: meta could host its own instance of mastodon, where the facebook app could run. x corp would host their own instance, which is the twitter app with its own moderation rules and designs. but its users could interact with the users in the facebook app and viceversa. meanwhile, those who are not confortable with the practices of these two corporations have the ability to join an indie instance, or run their own, all while being able to connect with the people on the other side. it's like email!
tumblr: an old classic that has gracefully aged. the tagging system is actually put to good use here, allowing you to carefully filter the content you want to consume. you can also configure your feed to show in chronological order, and disable all "for you page"-like recommendations. plus it has its own culture, one that devalues the current internet enshittification (you wont find thinly veiled ads nor engagement bait)
perfectly imperfect: a gen-z take on social media! very inspired by old tumblr, but also unique in its own way. has a different take on posting: here posts are called "recs", and the platform has an emphasis on "recommending" things you are into (media, food, places, and even experiences to have). it also has a focus on customization. the community is very small so you'll see the same faces constantly. still trying to figure out the intricacies of this one!!!
status cafe and piclog: two minimalist takes on social media. the first one is an extremely stripped-down approach to microblogging. you can only post a small message, and customize your profile; that's it. the second one is similar but inspired by metroflog/fotolog, you upload a very low quality jpeg in a universal feed. these are more of a companion to full-fledged websites, but i think adding a comment section for profiles or posts could make them work as very minimalist alt-platforms on their own.
dreamwidth: a livejournal inspired alt-platform. haven't really used neither the original nor this one, but from what i can gather, it's a community focused on long form content, basically like blogs but with a social component. you can join groups and fine-tune your privacy options. really want to check out this one, maybe cross-post from my blog!
scuttlebutt: this one is crazy: p2p social media! messages seem to be shared from friend to friend, so it can even work offline. seems like you can join hubs, either from the web or from local places: imagine going to a new city and connecting to a cafe's hub, and learning about all the local gossip. it's like torrent for gossiping? frankly i struggle a bit to understand how it works. we should try it out someday!
some old-school forums are still alive, and they are a better alternative to mainstream social media. if you're active in one, please share the link with me! (i also forgot about some platforms. will probably update this post when i remember the names)
these alt-platforms are fascinating, and their concepts are necessary to adopt new frameworks that can battle against the meta/google/X trifecta. i am already a member on some of them, and expect to see me in more very soon! yet the problem still remains. i really appreciate these platforms, most of them are accesible for new members and are very easy to use, as they still follow the conventions most of us are used to. posts and likes are convenient ways to be acknowledged by other people, and there's no shame in that! the alt-platforms allow us to be part of the spectacle without falling prey to the algorithmic machine. they do have a place, and let's be honest; it's already hard to convince most people to move from mainstream social media in the first place, so why not make it easy for them?
yet nonetheless, i think there's better ways to be acknowledged by our fellow humans. the WWW has always provided a way to acknowledge our presences in a purposeful and intentional way, even before social media and feeds were created. there is no need to scream into the void that is the "for you page". i will shamelessly steal a quote from gilles deleuze, quoted from "how to do nothing" by jenny odell:
"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. stupidity’s never blind or mute. so it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing. because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."
the mainstream social media we use on the daily are specifically designed to strip away this "right to say nothing" from us, as it's not profitable for their owners. short-form content is instantaneous, it is not made to last and make an impression on us. it does not allow us to ponder and reflect, its only purpose is to make us engage. mainstream social media are the repressive forces!
and alt-platforms, god bless their souls, are very similar to them, and we cannot help but engage with them in a similar frame of mind. some of the alt-platforms are focused on long-form content, yes, but still. while i commend the efforts of every contributor, i cannot help but think that replacing instagram with tumblr might not be as feasible as we think in the long run. it cannot be the only way we communicate with each other through the internet.
the WWW, down to its bare basics, is nothing more than a protocol to share written information. html, the language that structures every website and every webapp, is just a method to format text and media. i propose we stop engaging so much with social media platforms, and focus more on using the WWW for the sole thing it was created for: to simply put something up on the internet, and share it to the world. write something, and ponder on what you really want to say. there is no need to play the game of the algorithm and conform our thoughts to what it deems useful or interesting. just... upload something to the internet. be it a notion/github/neocities/whatever site, a pastebin, a blog, or just a barebones html webpage. that is enough.
there is community and kinship to be found in social media, yes, but in my opinion, the website in itself is just as effective to foster meaningful and thoughtful interactions with one another. i focused a lot on the importance of layouts, design and art in the previous section, but i actually think they're not the most important factors in the process of communication through digital means. there is a reason this section of my website is so plain in comparison to all the other ones: it can be read from every single device in the world, and it will be compatible with any browser as long as computers exist. a html webpage is immortal, it the closest thing we have to clay, papyrus and stones. platforms come and go, content is removed and lost, but this site will be here as long as i care enough to host it.
"the medium is the message", some say, and i desperately hope that's true in this case. i can only hope this humble wall of text can change at least a single person's point of view. i hope it can prove that there are meaningful things outside of the mainstream internet, and that those things can still participate in cultural discourse. this wall of text probably isn't even indexed in a search engine: it will only be read by those adventurous enough to find it, and that is by design. those who do are the ones most likely to understand the importance of escaping the walled gardens big tech has trapped us in.
there is a way to grow our own gardens in the digital realm and that's hosting a personal site. make a website, just for the sake of it! share it with your friends and family. upload things that matter to you, not to network or to accumulate internet points, but just to meaningfully connect with other people (the most joyful thing that exists in this universe).
a website will be forever yours, as long as you take care of it. your garden slowly grows with you, and if you mantain it with tender and care, all its flowers will blossom. you will own a piece of ground in the world, and everyone will be able to visit it, that's the magic of this little amazing thing that is the internet.
i think everyone has something meaningful to share. you are brave and you can truly express yourself: be sure to freak free from the limits imposed on you. i will be here to listen to you when that day comes :D
how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy, by jenny odell: obligatory reading!!! a fantastic book that not only deals with big tech's attention economy, but with interesting ideas relating to art, philosophy, social theory, environmentalism and the meaning of the self. this is what radicalized me lol
intro to the web revival, by melonking: a manifesto of the "web revival" movement, focusing on the philosophy of this alt-platform movement and how to be part of it.
yes, you are living in a simulation, by horses: a video essay touching on the philosophy of hyperreality, by baudrillard, and how it relates to our current technological/social landscape. we already are in the metaverse, we just haven't noticed...
contra el algoritmo: cultivar jardines digitales en vez de likes: an extension of the "website as a garden" metaphor, focusing on the importance of growing these slow intimate spaces on the web. it is in spanish, but youtube's auto-subtitles features work very good to understand the video. this is the philosophy behind this website!
the internet was a place, by sarah davis baker: a video essay that reminisces about the internet before smartphones, before we became so hyperconnected the internet became an extension of reality. view it as an extension of the second part of this essay, it touches on similar themes!
this is a motherfucking website, by @thebarrytone: an ode to (and satire about) minimalist web design. very old but still relevant! extension to the third part of this essay. the design (or lack thereof) in this article is inspired by this site :p