Decentralize Your life!
Feb 7, 2025
Tags: blog neocities AI internet
Fuck the corporate internet
Every day I’m finding more small blogs that are skipping the large platforms, moving away from social media, saying “vaya con Dios” to the internet that has been sold to us ad nauseum since the arrival of WEB 2.0! The hope is this is a rising movement, and people will purposefully abandon these capitalist institutions and build their own small conclaves on the internet. That’s what I’m doing, or I guess that’s what I’ve done! The one hitch in my giddyup so far is relying on Neocities to host this site because at any moment, Neocities could go away! They could also milkshake duck themselves into oblivion just like Substack has done! They could also be purchased by hitler 2.0 (or is that 3.0 now, post innauguration?) and you wouldn’t want to be caught dead with associating with their platforms.
So what options does that leave us with? Or rather not us which is the roll up your sleeves and re-learn HTML & CSS and learn about static websites and how to build them? Well unfortunately, it’s more grim than ever out there and that’s why I feel like we all may be screwed.
You Could Build Your Own Website
This is a great idea and something that can be fun and very rewarding. If you are reading this and want to get started there are lots of resources on Neocities and the world wide web that will help you get started.
The biggest problem is where to put it? Websites cost time and money and a lot of the options for websites are bad! I made the mistake a few years ago of signing up for hostgator as my professional website (run on wordpress) and it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made! They offer bad support and will not offer any solutions besides the upcharge? Want to hide your who-is information? 14.99 per year and no sweat. Want to make sure your wordpress doesn’t implode every fortnight? Pay 3.99 per month for systemic backups! Has the service left your site open to vulnerabilities that caused malware to infect it (probably not!)? Well don’t worry, for 14.99 a month their crack cybersecurity task force will fix it for you. It’s nonsense. Pretty soon you’re paying a mortgage to host a website on a terrible service. That’s not what the general public is going to want to do so they can post cat photos and complain about the internet.
These problems aren’t relegated to hostgator. If you look around there plenty of horror stories and problems with all available webhosts. And this is before getting into the myriad of A.I. assistants and website builders or whatever else that is being shoved in. Whoever said “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” was talking about hosting.
You Could Use a blog service
There are lots of blog services out there! Neocities is one and I do really like them even though I didn’t love their AI protection response. Nekoweb is another geocities-like that seems to have a great service with competitive pricing and a great free tier. You could also use something more all-inclusive like BearBlog! There are lots of awesome websites being hosted on bear.blog and I like the creators’ mission statement manifesto, though as we all know you cannot necessarily trust the altruism of one person to stay satiated forever! And the long term viability of these should be questioned as well. Geocities didn’t survive the corporate buyouts, blogger has been owned by google since 2003 so that could disappear at any second. Even without their shitty speedrun into ruining internet search and adding AI into everything in the worst way, they killed off inbox and I will literally never forgive them. This offers a “What’s the fucking point” dilemma to a lot of people! And I get it! I don’t really know what the solution to this is because it’s a big problem.
A personal website is a lonely, lonely place
I spend a lot of time practicing writing and reviewing cameras and sharing analog photographs and I have no idea if anyone is visiting or seeing any of this. Even now I’m going to write this thing up and I’ll have no idea if anyone can even reach this. Comments on websites are a tough value proposition. Who moderates those? What kind of authentication does it take to even post it? Do people really need to sign up for another service just to leave a comment on a blog they rarely visit? Static websites don’t really have a lot of comment options. Even a simple “like” or “i read this” button would add a layer of complexity, or at the very least a service you need to sign up for and maintain. Lastly with the way the internet works, even keeping an email address on your website for anyone to see can open you up to spam and other scams! It sucks out there!
Who knows?!
I don’t know what the solution is but I’m happy I’ve endeavored on taking on this blog. I’m hoping in years to come the process can become a little easier for people, and for more people to take up the mantle to make internet what they hope it can be as opposed to just taking what is given to us. Send me an email if you agree or disagree with any of this. cyb3rbuffalo on gmail !
SEE! I can’t even put my email out there!!
