“Make 2024 the year of the personal website” —Matthias Ott

Matthias wrote about this exact topic last year and I remember reading it. At the time I only had essays on my website and nowhere to pen my shorter, more fleeting, less fleshed-out thoughts. But I still remember that reading it gave me a sense of excitement knowing there were more people around than just me clicking away on their personal websites. To me these are the last great remnants of the idealised, romanticised web of the ’90s and ’00s.

As part of my personal website overhaul for 2024 I made Marginalia (what you’re reading now). It’s fodder for my essays and a place for me to think openly, freely and interact with others on the Indie Web. (See more on the About page.) I think this sort of ‘improvement’ is what Matthias means when he speaks of “making our sites a central part of our online identities”.

However, I’m going to be a bit pessimistic here: Matthias links to Anil Dash’s Rolling Stone article where Anil claims 2024 is poised to become “weird again” thanks to an “internet movement we haven’t seen in a quarter-century”—

Some of the most dominant companies on the internet are at risk of losing their relevance, and the rest of us are rethinking our daily habits in ways that will shift the digital landscape as we know it. Though the specifics are hard to predict, we can look to historical precedents to understand the changes that are about to come, and even to predict how regular internet users — not just the world’s tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes.

I agree in principle. I even wrote about something like this in my hurriedly penned work-in-progress “IndieWeb manifesto”. But the real success of this ongoing sleeper movement will not come from the fall of the corporate web but from the rest of us on the IndieWeb continuing as we have; because the CorpoWeb won’t take it lying down and the average internet user knows and cares far too little about the internet to spend even a weekend throwing together a site to call their own, much less the rest of the year keeping it maintained and updated.

But yes, there’s some change in the air, and I love that I am a small part of it. And I don’t think we should stop yet. As Matthias says, let’s make every year the year of the personal website but let’s also start reminding ourselves to do so every year because consistency matters. I’m all for it.

PS As a long-time Bayern fan and member myself, I don’t know what to make of Matthias being a Vfb supporter but I guess I’ll let it pass. Sigh.