💻 Blogs didn’t die– Social media just lied

✊🏻 Personal Sites = FREEDOM

There. I’ve said it. And I do not regret saying it.

From the early days of the web, many of us around the world were drawn to the idea of building our own personal presence online. Imagine: your own space, your own domain name, and just enough HTML/CSS (and maybe JavaScript or PHP) to craft something uniquely yours. Why? Because we wanted our voices, our thoughts, our art, and our skills to exist somewhere beyond daily life.

Some of us had to shell out money for a domain and hosting.¹ Others relied entirely on free services like Geocities and Angelfire.² Back then, changing your site’s background color or adding hover effects to your links felt “elite,” even if we copied code from web tutorial sites and customized it later.

No matter how we built our sites, including today’s no-code options, owning at least one website gave us true freedom. You could be a fast-food cashier by day and a pixel-art creator by night, showing off your creations to the world. That freedom wasn’t just creative. It was emotional.

Just the word freedom feels good, right?

Of course, life doesn’t allow unlimited personal freedom. Family, work, responsibilities; all limit how much time we can devote to ourselves. But the internet gives us a little corner where we can still breathe. And one of the most powerful things we can create, shape, and call our own?

Personal websites.

🗞️ The Context

Growing up in the early era of personal websites, I always felt pulled toward the indie web. Some of us stayed. Some moved on. Reality happens. Life gets busy. And that’s okay. But the desire for a personal online home never really disappears.

What triggered this post was a Medium article I found in my feed:
The End of Personal Websites — And Why That Might Be a Good Thing by Burk.³

For anyone who doesn’t want to pay for Medium, here’s the summary.

🧠 Summary of “The End of Personal Websites — And Why That Might Be a Good Thing” (Burk)⁴

Burk reflects on how personal websites used to be central to online identity — your own URL, your own design, your own digital home. But over time, creators have moved toward platforms like Medium, Substack, LinkedIn, and social networks because these places offer built-in audiences, distribution, hosting, and community without the maintenance headaches of running a website.

Platforms handle:

• visibility
• security
• hosting
• subscriptions
• comments
• distribution

…while personal sites require manual labor for all of that. Because of this, most people no longer maintain an active blog or self-hosted site, instead choosing platforms where their work is “seen” more easily. Burk argues this shift isn’t a bad thing — just the natural evolution of a web dominated by feeds rather than homepages.

Just a spoiler: some of his points, I agree with.

But the idea that “personal websites are dead”?
Nope. Absolutely not.

Personal websites — or, as I prefer to call it now, the indie web — is very much alive. In fact, it’s thriving. There’s a major revival happening, and people who never experienced the old web are now proudly building their own sites from scratch.

Would you like some proof? Let’s start with a webring. You all remember what a webring is, right? Webmaster Webring There’s a huge variety of personal websites in this webring. Many build one for nostalgia, others want to use modern techniques to incorporate the classic features of personal websites and combine them as one.

✋🏻 My Response

As an avid reader of Medium⁵, it would be easy for me to just reply to the author about his take. But honestly, it deserves a whole new blog post as a reply more than just a comment. Whether he sees this post or not, whether he responds to this or not, doesn’t matter much. Besides, most Medium readers pay more attention to the actual content than the comments towards that content.

There are some points from his post that I do agree with. There are points that I also relate to. Overall? I still disagree.

“Personal websites used to be awesome. Your own URL. Your own layout. Your own playground. Design freedom. I used to design websites. For me and some clients. It was a blast to play around with all the ideas I had. Now, I haven’t touched web design in ages.” — Burk (Medium)

Respectfully… that sounds like a you problem, not a “the web is dead” problem. The indie web fireworks show is still happening — he just stepped out of the venue before the finale.

Those who own (and owned) personal websites? They’re not necessarily professional web developers, web/UX designers, or technical writers, such as the author here. Many of them are students, part-time workers at fast food restaurants or stores, parents, readers, hobbyists. Personal websites don’t always mean blogs. Personal websites are unlimited, and many of them are in forms like the ones below:

• 👾 Pixel art galleries
• 🎨 Original art portfolios
• 🧩 Freebie sites such as clipart, graphics, resource packs
• 💻 Coding snippets, tools, tutorials
• 🗂️ Fan shrines, fan sites, fanlistings, fan collectives, fan archives
• 📚 Master lists, link libraries, webrings, cliques
• 📖 Original literature, fanfics, reviews
• 🧵 Text dumps, diaries, random thoughts
• 🔧 Project hubs or changelogs
• 🏪 Personal web store⁶
• 🌱 A homepage of personal vibes

Many of these websites never post blog entries at all. Some of them have a separate blog away from their personal sites. These sites just happen to exist, like a cozy bedroom on the internet. No one said having a blog constitutes a personal website.

A personal website is a home, not a content schedule. It’s a presence, not an algorithm feed. It’s a creative identity, not a publishing obligation.

The beauty of the indie web is that you can build whatever you want, update whenever you want, or not update for a year and it’s still “your place”. No guilt. No deadlines. No “audience retention.” No metrics breating down your neck.

THAT freedom is why personal websites are not dead. They simply evolved into whatever the owner wants them to be.

“For a long time, it felt like my own website was a form of digital independence. A little spot on the internet where no platform could shadow-ban me or tweak an algorithm that decides if anyone sees my work. But look around now… Most creators don’t have personal websites anymore. Or if they do, it’s a short bio and the last three links. What happened is simple. We moved. We migrated. We outsourced our digital homes to platforms that promised reach, ease of use, discoverability, community, monetization, and speed… Substack, Medium, Gumroad, Patreon, ConvertKit, WordPress.com, Notion. Personal websites are not dead, but they’re increasingly replaced by tools that come with a “website”. And maybe that’s not a tragedy. It’s progress.” – Burk (Medium)

Here’s the thing: I keep seeing this word “we” tossed around in articles like this: “we moved,” “we migrated,” “we all outsourced our digital homes.”

But… who exactly is “we”?

Because I sure didn’t move. A huge chunk of the indie web didn’t move.

The artists, the pixel-icon makers, the shrine-builders, the hobby coders, the fandom archivists, the tinkerers, the bloggers-who-still-blog — we never left our personal sites.

Platforms didn’t “replace” personal websites for everyone.
They replaced personal websites for people who stopped wanting to maintain one.

Some creators switched to Substack or Medium because it’s easier. Cool. Valid. But there are a lot of creators who are creating their own content for their personal enjoyment and to share theirs with other like-minded people. There are a lot of us who create for the sake of “building an audience”.

And that’s okay! People evolve. Tools evolve. Workflows evolve.

But saying “we moved” erases the entire community that stayed — the creators who still maintain their own corner of the web, who still hand-craft their layouts, who still care about digital independence, not just digital convenience.

We didn’t migrate.
We adapted.
We expanded.
We added platforms — we didn’t abandon home.

Now, many are crawling back to personal sites again because social media turned into a flaming trash pit and teh algorithm is their unstable landlord. Suddenly, this freedom we’re supposed to have to have an online presence is no longer free.

"Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, a personal website was your identity. […] It made sense because the alternatives were… just not great for all of that. Tumblr. Blogger. Old-school WordPress themes that looked… well… […] But owning the space also meant owning the maintenance. Hosting. Updates. Plugins. Backups. Analytics. Page builders. SEO settings. Security patches. DNS records that made no sense at all. Personal websites were freedom. But also chores. – Burk (Medium)

“Personal Websites Were Freedom… But Also Chores.”

(My Actual Response to That)

Burk writes:

“Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, a personal website was your identity.”

True… but also extremely oversimplified.

My journey wasn’t some “I bought a domain at age 12 and built an empire” storyline. I started building personal sites on Geocities and Angelfire using pure HTML – because young me didn’t know CSS existed, let alone hosting, domains, DNS, or any of the grown-up web things.

My first real blog was powered by Blogger – BEFORE Google bought it.

Back then, pre-Google Blogger wasn’t a hosted blogging platform at all. It was basically a publishing engine strapped onto whatever website structure you built.

Here’s how it actually worked:

• You had your own domain/hosting, getting hosted in a web publishing community, or hosted under someone else’s personal domain. Sometimes, you even get free hosting as a sudomain under the domain of the company you work for. ⁷
• Inside Blogger, you entered your FTP server address, username, password – yes, literally raw FTP credentials.
• You took your entire site layout – pure HTML, your own CSS, your divs, your iFrames, your sidebar – and pasted that code into Blogger’s template editor, inserting special Blogger template tags wherever the blog content should appear.
• Then you wrote posts directly inside the Blogger dashboard.
• When you hit Publish, Blogger generated static hTML pages for every new post and uploaded them into your subdomain via FTP – using whatever folder structure you set.

It didn’t style your site. it didn’t host your content. It didn’t give you a blogspot.com subdomain. It didn’t do anything automatically for you.

YOU built the site. Blogger just pushed the files.

Those Blogger template tags? It inspired future developers and startups in web publishing with their templating system:

• WordPress template tags
• Tumblr tags
• Liquid template tags (Shopify)
• Twig tags (PHP template tags)

… and more.

That system taught a whole generation of us:

• how templates and templating system work
• how to structure layouts
• how content management really works under the hood
• how static publishing pipelines function
• and how terrifyingly powerful hitting “Publish” can be when it overwrites your whole website 😭

When people talk about personal websites like they were always easy-peasy “hosted blogs,” I just laugh. Some of us were doing DevOps-level deployments at age 15 without even knowing the word DevOps.

Yes, personal websites were freedom. And yes, they came with chores – hosting, backups, DNS sorcery, plugin tantrums, security, all that fun stuff. But that’s not a flaw. That’s the deal.

As Uncle Ben wisely said in the Spider-Man (2002) movie:

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

If you want the power of a digital home that nobody can alogorithmically bury, demonetize, or delete on a whim, you take responsibility for maintaining it.

Freedom without responsibility isn’t freedom – it’s just someone else’s platform letting you play in their sandbox until they get bored.

“Platforms started doing everything better than personal websites. Substack made publishing super simple. Medium turned writing into a distribution machine. Gumroad let you sell in minutes. Social platforms became mini-homepages. AI tools filled in the gaps. And if you really wanted your “own” website, builder tools like Squarespace with hundreds of templates made it easier than ever before.[…]” – Burk (Medium)

The whole “platforms do everything better now” argument honestly reads like someone bragging about moving into a mansion… because they don’t want to do their own dishes.

Yes – Substack, Medium, Gumroad, TikTok, whatever – they’re convenient. They’re fast. They have staff, algorithms, templates, built-in audiences. That’s great. But convenience doesn’t erase the value of personal ownership.

Think of it like this:

You grow up in your family home. You do chores. You move into a dorm or apartment. Still chores. You buy your first home. Yep – still chores.

Now imagine you move into a giant mansion and hire a full household staff. Suddenly, you don’t have to lift a finger… But now everything depends on people you don’t control.

If the maid breaks your heirloom vase? Too bad. If the gardener kills your favorite tree? Oopsie. If the butler decides to burn the whole mansion down? Well… there goes everything.

That’s exactly what happens when you hand your entire online presence to platforms.

Algorithms change. Policies shift. Monetization rules flip overnight. Entire sites vanish. Accounts get shadow-banned or locked for no reason. Your work becomes fragile – because it isn’t yours anymore.

So sure, platforms are convenient.

But convenience is not the same as stability.

And it is definitely not the same as digital ownership.

And then he says,

“No one goes to juliawrites.com anymore.”

Excuse me? I would absolutely go to juliawrites.com. In fact, I’d subscribe, bookmark it, RSS it, and probably read it with a cup of tea like a civilized human being. A personal site is organic, intentional, and independent – not a dancing-for-the-algorithm circus act on TikTok.

People don’t visit personal sites anymore beacuse creators abandoned them… not because readers stopped caring.

Give people a well-designed personal website with good writing? Fresh original content such as art, short stories, poetry, and the likes? They will absolutely show up. They’re just tired of being force-fed content through platforms engineered for speed, outrage, and addiction.

So no – it’s not that “no one visits personal sites.”

it’s that platforms trained creators to believe no one would.

🧯 “Why Personal Websites Fell Behind” — Or Why This Entire Section Is Just… No.

The writer lists five reasons personal websites supposedly “fell behind,” but all five assume that every reader behaves the same way and that “audience” only means algorithm-trained scrollers with attention spans of three seconds.

Let’s break this down.

1. “Readers don’t browse homepages”

Which readers? TikTok doom-scrollers? Sure.
But there is an entire population of readers — artists, devs, writers, fandom folks, indie web lovers, researchers, scrapbookers, bloggers — who actively prefer homepages because they don’t want algorithm sludge dictating their day.

Some of us like intentional browsing.
Some of us still type URLs.
Some of us use RSS.
Some of us want quiet corners of the internet that aren’t trying to sell us socks we looked at once.

The writer is describing his reading habits and projecting it as universal.

2. “Maintenance sucks”

Maintenance sucks… if you don’t enjoy running a website.

Some of us treat our sites the way gardeners treat their gardens:
hands-on, cozy, creative, chaotic, deeply personal.

And besides —
updating DNS records for 10 minutes every few months >>> dealing with platform drama, algorithm collapses, layout changes, policy shifts, paywall experiments, and random “we own your content now” clauses.

Responsibility isn’t a flaw.
It’s part of the charm.

3. “Websites don’t have built-in discovery”

You know what else doesn’t?
Your house.
Your studio.
Your journal.

Because a personal site isn’t supposed to be a mall food court.
It’s your home.
People find it because they want to, not because an algorithm shoved it in their face between cat memes and crypto ads.

Also: discovery happens through search engines, blogrolls, RSS feeds, link pages, webrings, social posts, Discord communities, friend circles, newsletters, and the oldest method on Earth:
word of mouth.

👀 Additional Reality Check: Personal Website Owners Aren’t Chasing Fame

There’s another massive flaw in this argument.

The writer treats “personal websites” as if they’re some kind of mini-Substack-without-the-distribution, implying the whole point of having your own site is to chase viral reach.

Uhhh… no.
Most personal website owners are not aspiring influencers.

We’re not trying to “grow a funnel.”
We’re not trying to “optimize conversions.”
We’re not trying to “hack discoverability.”

We build personal sites because:

• we enjoy the craft
• we want full creative control
• we want a cozy home for our projects
• we want a stable archive
• we want a corner of the internet that isn’t rented from a corporation
• we like connecting with like-minded people, not massive audiences

And honestly?
Many personal sites don’t even have blogs.

They’re art galleries.
Pixel shrines.
Changelogs.
Craft rooms.
Code gardens.
Writing portfolios.
Fandom shrines.
Journal pages.
Character archives.
Worldbuilding encyclopedias.
Or just… vibes.

People like us build because we love building — not because we want to become Substack-famous.

So the whole “websites are bad at discovery” point?
It doesn’t apply when discovery was never the metric.

We don’t want millions of random visitors.
We want the right few who click because they care.

That’s the indie web difference.

4. “SEO is weird”

SEO is weird because Google made it weird.
Not because personal websites failed.

And ironically:
niche indie sites win at SEO because (1) original content, (2) consistent voice, and (3) low competition.

Personal websites aren’t dying —
Google search quality is.

5. “Audiences want clean, simple interfaces”

Which audiences?
Corporate audiences?
VC audiences?
People who want every website to look like Medium, Substack, Notion, or Squarespace?

Personal websites aren’t supposed to look like sterile productivity apps.

The indie web thrives precisely because it is weird, playful, artsy, nostalgic, quirky, handmade, and very much not standardized.

If a reader can’t handle a unique layout, that’s fine — there are a million cookie-cutter platforms for them.
But some of us want joy, personality, and creativity in the places we build.

TL;DR

The entire argument treats “readers” like one bland monolith.

But readers are diverse.
Creators are diverse.
Personal websites are diverse.

And the indie web isn’t dead —
this writer just stopped looking for it.

💬 My Responses to Burk’s “Maybe This Is Good Actually?” Section

1. “We get to focus on writing, not building”

First of all, who is “we” again?

Because not everyone on the indie web is a writer.

A huge portion of personal sites belong to:

• pixel artists
• illustrators
• fandom shrine makers
• designers
• tinkerers
• hobby coders
• archivists
• worldbuilders
• crafters
• collectors
• diarists
• people who just want a cute page with their OCs and favorite links

Most indie site owners don’t introduce themselves like:

“Hi, I’m Sandra, a UX/UI consultant with 10 years of expertise…”

They introduce themselves like:

“Hi, I’m Sandra, I like anime, writing, and making pretty websites.”

The “old model” he’s describing belongs to professional bloggers, influencers, and content marketers — not the average personal site owner who builds because they enjoy the craft itself.

We don’t see “maintenance.”
We see creation.

And guess what? Canva, Adobe Express, Elementor⁸, Tailwind CSS, classless CSS frameworks, and builder themes have made “web design” unbelievably accessible anyway.

So his point is aimed at a completely different crowd… maybe for those who want to become an influencer and/or a content creator? Even so, making a bold statement such as Personal websites are dead does not apply to everyone.

2. “Momentum matters!”

Momentum matters if you’re a brand, influencer, or trying to go viral.

Most indie site creators are not.

Personal websites aren’t on a publishing schedule. We aren’t grinding newsletters to grow a funnel. We’re not hustling for reach. We create when the muse hits, not when the algorithm demands it.

A handmade website is like a sketchbook — not an analytics dashboard.

3. “Readers want content where they already spend time”

Sure — if your readers are the Substack/Medium/TikTok crowd.

But indie web folks and long-form readers still:

• read blogs
• follow RSS
• browse personal sites
• hang out on small web communities (32-Bit Café, MelonLand, Wiby, Buttondown, Kagi Small Web, etc.)
• use webrings
• bookmark sites they like

He ignores the entire ecosystem outside corporate platforms.

And ironically — people leave platforms specifically because they want something quieter, calmer, more meaningful.

4. “Substack/Medium/Notion pages are websites!”

Nah.
They’re profiles.
Rentals.
Corporate cubicles.

You don’t own the design, the server, the branding, the structure, the future, or the business rules. You’re decorating a room inside someone else’s mall.

A personal website is a home, not an account.

5. “Diversify across platforms!”

This one I actually agree with — but not for the reasons he thinks.

Diversification is smart because platforms die.
Ask anyone who lost their work to Xanga, Vox, Geocities, Tumblr purges, sudden shutdowns, Elon Musk’s nonsense, algorithm collapses, etc.

The only stable archive is your own domain + a personal site.

He thinks diversification is about reach.
Indie web folks use it for preservation.

6. “Brand lives in the writing — no one cares about your header”

This is just… objectively false.

Design is communication.

The colors you choose? Tone.
The layout? Tone.
The fonts? Tone.
The header illustration? Tone.
The quirky vibe of your sidebar? Tone.
Your nav bar? Tone.
Your pixel art? Tone.
Your mascots? Tone.

People absolutely do care — because your design is the first thing they experience before they read a single sentence.

A personal site is a self-portrait.
Not a Google Doc.

💬 Side note: personal sites don’t need comments to be meaningful

A lot of personal blog owners turn comments off — not because “nobody is reading,” but because:

• we don’t want spam
• we don’t want trolls
• we don’t want to babysit moderation
• we don’t want strangers trauma-dumping
• we don’t want SEO bots clogging our servers
• and most of all, we don’t need validation metrics to justify our writing

Corporate platforms measure value in likes, comments, shares, and impressions.

Personal websites measure value in expression, permanence, and autonomy.

Just because you don’t see engagement doesn’t mean engagement isn’t happening.
People read quietly. People bookmark quietly. People come back quietly. And for those who do care, they would take the time to reach out through their Contact Form or through the many of their social media profiles linked.

Silence doesn’t equal “no audience.”
It just means we aren’t performing for the algorithm.

“Unnecessary”? For who, exactly?

This is where the author loses me completely.

Saying personal websites are “unnecessary for most creators” is like saying sketchbooks are unnecessary for most artists just because Procreate exists.

A personal website is not a landline phone —
it’s a studio, a portfolio, a journal, a gallery, a lab,
a place to experiment without corporate landlords breathing down your neck.

The author lists:

• big portfolios
• complex businesses
• agency work
• SEO-heavy content
• larger teams
• visual brands
• custom integrations

as people who “still need” personal sites.

But here’s the thing:

🔥 Personal sites were never only for businesses.

They’ve always been for individuals — hobbyists, niche creators, collectors, fandom builders, coders, diarists, and the millions of us who make stuff simply because we love making stuff.

Most personal-site owners aren’t trying to be “creators” in the monetized, platform-industrial-complex sense.

We’re not chasing followers.
We’re not trying to “scale.”
We’re not optimizing our “funnels.”

We’re building homes — not “content distribution pipelines.”

A platform profile is a rental unit.
A personal website is property you actually own.

So no — personal websites are not “landlines.”

They are gardens. Workshops. Memory archives. Cultural artifacts. Identity anchors.
And those things will never be unnecessary.

Not now.
Not in Web3.
Not in Web75.
Not ever.

The Bottom Line (My Version)

Personal websites aren’t “dying.”
They’re evolving — and more importantly, they’re returning to the people who actually care about the open web.

Platforms didn’t “get better.” Platforms got bigger — and with bigness comes algorithms, monetization pressure, audience-chasing, and design uniformity. Great for businesses. Great for influencers. Great for people whose entire online identity fits neatly into a feed.

But that’s not everyone.

Some of us don’t want to live inside platform ecosystems 24/7.
Some of us enjoy the craft.
Some of us want to build something that won’t vanish because a CEO woke up cranky and “pivoted to video.”

Personal sites are not obsolete.
They’re not optional.
They’re not some nostalgic relic.

They are digital sovereignty.

They are the last place online where:

• algorithms can’t bury you
• platforms can’t moderation-sweep years of your work
• design isn’t standardized to the same white background and san-serif font
• your identity isn’t limited to what a sidebar widget allows

And while platforms are convenient, convenience has never been a substitute for ownership.

If this writer prefers living entirely on corporate platforms, cool.
Let him.
But that doesn’t give him the authority to declare personal websites “unnecessary” for everyone else.

For grassroots creators, fandom communities, pixel artists, indie devs, diarists, hobby collectors, and people who simply want a corner of the internet that feels like home — personal websites are still alive, thriving, and ridiculously important.

So no — they’re not dying.

They’re just in the hands of people who actually treasure them.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Where can we find (organic) personal websites?

To close this post, I’d like to share some links. I admit that I haven’t joined a lot of them, but when the right time comes, I will.

• Webmaster Webring
• 32-bit Cafe
• MelonLand
• Neocities((Not only that Neocities is a free web hosting service, but they are a community of their own too)
• Caludin – My long-time friend Megan’s long-running forum. You don’t have to own a website to join, but if you are looking for a small community of chill people sharing your own interests, please do join! I post there sometimes when I’m not too busy.

I’m sure there are some smaller indie web communities out there, but if anyone got any recommendations, please share.

Stay free! Stay open! Stay organic! Stay real!