Re: Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media?

Kev Quirk made a post titled "Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media?" where he responded to a question he was asked on Mastodon. I've had a personal web site for almost 30 years in one form or another, so here's my take.

The original question was:

I am always a little curious as to the point of a personal webpage when you can rely on social media for a presence. What is your primary motivator for investing the time and effort? - Jason Brewster

It's my house

Kev's answer boils down to ownership and agency. He can add or remove features make his site his own unlike the rest of social media where as the product user you're just there to produce the content that gives them value.

If I post something here, it's mine, I own in it in perpetuity. On social media that's not the case. Terms of services can change, platforms can disappear, or things can just go wrong. If I had all my content on a platform I have no control over, and they went poof, I'd be fucked.

Kev Quirk

It'll live for as long as I want it to

But more than that as Juha-Matti Santala said in his reply to Kev

Social media is short-lived, fast-paced and in most places, it’s really hard to find anything that’s older than a few days or weeks. The feed is the main feature and unless you’re there right when things happen, it’s likely you miss them altogether.

Juha-Matti Santala

That's the thing with social media it needs a constant churn of content or it risks becoming stale or being labelled a ghost-town and killed off (RIP Google+) even Mastodon, which I love, suffers from this. With a Personal site posts can and often do get hits months if not years after they were posted. I've had this domain for a long time and I still see requests for XNA 4.0 tutorial pages from 2011 that have been long since lost to site rebuilds and server moves.

Even developers can be artists

Something they can both agree on is that it gives them some place to express themselves.

I'm not going to start messing about with the CSS on Fosstodon, as that would affect tens of thousands of people. [sic] Here on the other hand, I can piss around to my hearts content.

Kev Quirk

Especially for a web developer, a personal site is a great place to have because it will allow you to experiment with new technologies in a safe way where there are no deadlines, no need to pick tech based on its business value or to worry about breaking something.

Juha-Matti Santala

I like to play with things, I've been working on a SSG/CMS of my own but I keep stopping and rewriting it before I can deploy it here because I keep coming up with a new fix or a better way to do things. On the day I do finally say "sod it" and push up an M.V.P.¹ it'll be mine and there won't be another like it on the web. Even this incarnation of my site is a Hugo generated site using a theme that is no longer maintained by the original developer. I have a fork of it, on my GitHub that I keep tweaking to my liking.

You are the product

For all company controlled sites on the internet you are the product, even on sites that offer a paid service, one way or another they are selling any and all information you give them or that they can extract from you. When you have your own site you choose what you make available, if someone finds value in that so be it, you are the arbiter of what you give out.

Corporate controlled services can extract and cross reference metadata from a host of sources and then sell that information. When visiting any site you have to trust that the host isn't doing this, but by signing up to a social media entity owned by shareholders whose only priority is to maximise profits, then you have to expect that you are just an income stream to them.

In this age of AI tomfoolery even your own site is subject to this financial pillaging, the likes of Perplexity are scraping sites even if the owner has indicated that they don't want them to.

The other day I found a project on GitHub called img2dataset that is used for scraping images for use in Machine Learning and the developer has included handy opt-out directives:-

Websites can pass the http headers X-Robots-Tag: noai, X-Robots-Tag: noindex , X-Robots-Tag: noimageai and X-Robots-Tag: noimageindex By default img2dataset will ignore images with such headers.

To disable this behavior and download all images, you may pass --disallowed_header_directives '[]'

See AI use impact to understand better why you may decide to enable or disable this feature.

The people that run AI systems are grifters who over promise and under deliver, and they are going to try and extract their money from wherever they can. But we can block these crawlers. Make your robots.txt disallow all and Ban any IP address that requests it. Ban any request that uses a dodgy looking User Agent string. Be hostile to anything that isn't a real person. Make things hard for the money grabbing bastards that want to turn your hard work into profit for themselves, and you know what, if you have your own site you can.

"But you'll never get any traffic to you're site", "you'll be invisible on the internet..." and? you say that like it's a bad thing? I don't have a personal site for fame or clout. I have a personal site because I need a creative outlet. If I go to a job interview I can tell them about the things I've worked on and give them a link to a page that showcases that work. I can vent my spleen out over how stupid the world is and nobody can cancel me. I can take pictures of my food and nobody has to see it. But I don't do it for you I do it for me.

Conclusion

I still have a social media presence I just prefer to post my thoughts here. I killed off Twitter, Instagram & Facebook I'm working on getting rid of Google. Linked-in is a joke but still somewhat useful for Job hunting. GitHub has it's uses but I mostly use Gitea on my home server. Mastodon is the only one I like using because if the my instance goes bad I can move to another or build my own.

A personal web site is the last best act of defiance against the stale homogeneity of internet interactions.

If you don't like it? Move along, I'll get by without you, but if you do like it tell someone, anyone, start a conversation.

Links

• Why Have a Personal Site Instead of Social Media? - Kev Quirk
• Why a personal site rather than social media presence? - Juha-Matti Santala