On The Personal Web

There is some kind of gravitational force that causes people who make a Neocities website to explain why they did so in favor of social media. So let's get that out of the way right now.

I don't like social media.

What I like even less though is these types who say "the problem these days is those darn internets (which I'm cuttin' down). That's what's causing ALL of the alienation today."

What a load of BS. Had it not been for the internet, there are just a lot of things I straight up would not be able to express. Certain communities simply could not exist without this new world built on symbols. So the people who say this stuff can stuff it and touch grass all they'd like, but I never was going to be some agarthan naturalist-chad, with or without the web.

I'm not sure if I've got some kind neurodivergent condition, nor do I care to find out, but I do know some neurodivergent people who share that text is better than speech for expressing themselves. I feel very much the same way in this regard, and have to imagine how annoying this is to hear for anyone who isn't highly verbal. This kind of pre-internet nostalgia that I see everywhere falls flat when you realize the people who wax poetic about how bad the internet are usually the ones getting into the pointless fights and watching the slop they claim to rail against. They are more likely projecting their paranoid obsessions than having any genuine concern for people who find meaning through the web.

I still have some social media. I have an art Twitter that does pretty well; I still scroll to see videos of horses being goofy on camera. But I just can't really get that excited about getting on the 24/7 post treadmill these days. Facebook/Instagram/normie-slop is an over-beaten joke and to rant on that would be hyperventilating.

Smaller platforms exist. I gave Tumblr another shot for the first time since the 2019 explosion and I definitely like the vibe. But I didn't really get sucked in. The way you post art there feels similar to how it did on Twitter; the community seems fixated on characters being 'relatable' and worshipping intellectual properties. Meh. This isn't to say I dislike fanartists; there is some great fanart there, but it's not what I wanna make! So why would I focus on a platform where I get 2.5 notes per note when my Twitter has 2000 followers? Is that fixating on the numbers? Yes, it is, but the number is there, under every single post you make, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I tried Bluesky and was instantly repulsed. It's just Twitter, but it suffers the same issues that pretty much every alternative platform in the 2010s suffered from. It was built on opposition to the old thing, the thing built by the other side. The side with all the bad-guys. As such, an annoying amount of the usage there is about being in opposition to the old monolith rather than actually innovating. It's still just shallow shortform takes where virality, rage-porn, and actual porn is the name of the game. I don't have a problem with this necessarily but don't kid me that this is some grand new frontier.

No matter what I tried: nothing stuck. Even well-loved and artist-centric NewGrounds felt weird. (It's a legitimately good platform. I just hate how much fanfare every piece needs; I gotta title it, I gotta tag it. Guys half the time I don't even know what the heck I just drew; why does it feel like we're putting it in an exhibition?)

No matter what: the thing with these platforms is that every piece of art needs to be atomized into a discrete blip of time in this deluge. That just isn't how it works for me, and as such I suck at getting my stuff out there consistently enough to build a following, even if I'm drawing like a madman in private.

Then I saw Neocities. The sites here are cool, and the people are interesting. There is no timeline. I can burn my stuff all down with a torch and rebuild it whenever I want, and there are no restrictions whatsoever in how I make it look, how things are organized, whether it needs to be optimized for a phone. It makes perfect sense to me. I'll be adding more to this website soon. If you like it, good for you. See ya.

Does this still work?

Ah, great!