I've been growing sick and tired of social media lately, so when I stumbled on some videos about the old internet and the newer 'indie web' scene, I knew I had to explore and bask in the artistic soul people put into these spaces. Multiple of the websites I kept came across inspired to carve out my own little corner of the internet, away from the big social media corporations.

    In this journey of digital discovery, I've made the decision to remove all social media apps from my phone. I'm just exhausted by all the low-quality dopamine hits I get just scrolling. I want my time to feel intentional. My current objective is to replace mindless scrolling, with browsing the more hidden corners of the internet. I find it so much more fulfilling to see the creativity others have, and just witness the absolute soul these sites have! A far cry away from the soulless, algorithm-pleasing content you see within modern social media platforms.

    I've only been working on my site for a couple days so far, and gone without social media for even a couple days less than that. However I'm already noticing so many positive effects from making this leap. Hell, I even went outside today for once! I'm usually locked in my room, in bed, binging YouTube or wasting time on whatever game I managed to click in my steam library. Instead, I went to a local coffee shop in my city's downtown area and actually got caught up on math homework. I didn't work on this site while I was there, purely because my site is pretty openly queer, and although that coffee shop is a loud supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, the area I'm in isn't as friendly as I'd like. In other words, my anxiety wouldn't let me.

    I guess the point of this whole post is that I've been enjoying my life, for the first time in a while honestly. My quality of life has significantly improved, and my mental health is doing a lot better. (It really was that damn phone!) I'm not wasting my day away mindlessly consuming content. I'm not being force-fed current events and hearing about what rights I'm loosing 24/7. While it is important to stay connected with loved ones (family, friends, etc.), and as important as it is to stay updated on current events, it's been incredibly helpful to stop and take a breather. Yes, the world's scary. Yes, I'm actively loosing the right to live as myself in the US right now. However, It's felt so much healthier to intentionally seek out that news when I can handle it, rather than be force-fed it 24/7 non-stop.

    I'd say, if you can afford to take that break, do it. Delete it all, even just for a weekend. And of course, I'll always advocate for starting a website. It's been honestly my most enjoyable project lately. There is a slight learning curve, but there's so many tools nowadays that make creating a site almost trivial. The only cost is honestly time and a domain name! I run my site on a free-forever Oracle Cloud VM running a "self"-hosted WordPress instance. The only cost I have is my domain name which is roughly $15-USD/year through NameCheap. Hell, they had a deal where the first year for a ".com" site was like $6-USD!

    If you absolutely need something completely free, there's options like NeoCities and NekoWeb. (NOTE: if it matters to you, NekoWeb seems to block generative AI crawlers and scrapers, whereas on NekoWeb I believe you have to incorporate that yourself. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken!) My point is, if you've ever had a desire to create something entirely your own, now's as good a time as any! There's so many tools and options, and the community is thriving! There's so many resources that there's honestly no excuse not to. Obviously if you just don't want to, then you absolutely don't have to. But if you do... All I'm saying is you might as well.

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LINKS:

NameCheap – https://www.namecheap.com
NeoCities – https://neocities.org
NekoWeb – https://nekoweb.org