Why personal websites are back
A quiet revival is happening on the open web. Here is what it looks like, and why it matters.
Personal websites never disappeared, but for a while they were demonstrably uncool. Why bother running your own site when you could have a profile on a platform that did everything for you?
Then the platforms got worse. Algorithms started burying posts. Reach collapsed. Anything you wrote ended up training a model that didn't pay you. Suddenly, having a place on the web that was actually yours started to look smart again.
The new wave of personal sites has a different feel from the old one. They're often hand-coded, deliberately small, and unapologetically idiosyncratic. People are publishing reading lists, weird little games, garden diaries, recipes, half-finished essays, browser experiments. Stuff that doesn't perform well on any feed but is great when you stumble onto it directly.
If you're looking for the new internet, this is where it's growing. Quietly. On purpose.