Greetings, welcome to my website! You probably wonder why I made this website so I will try to explain as shortly as I can.
Social media#
The initial motivation of my choice to make my own website was social media. Social media in the beginning was a place on the web that you went to for a limited amount of time to chat with other people and/or see posts. In short it was a social web, meant for communication and exchange of ideas. That lasted from the late 90s to 2015-16 when mobile phones overtook the desktop pc. That change alone caused massive change to personal computing, the internet and society itself. At that time and onwards more more and more people would own a smartphone which meant that everyone started participating on the internet, it wasn’t just computer scientists and young adults anymore. With people came their attention and attention means money to marketers. Ads pre-existed but the methods used to promote them were primitive compared to what we have today. The (recommendation) algorithm now reigns and it’s goal is to keep you watching as long as possible so you can watch ads. What I experience today is that these algorithms are exactly calibrated to serve you just enough interesting content and then recommend spam just so you keep searching. And so the internet got stale and full of material without any meaningful reason of existence.
Digital sovereignty and the indie web#
In reaction to the enlargement of social media emerged movements like the Indie Web and Web Revival. The goal of these movements is to bring back the old web (or part of it). In the early days of the web, people made their own personal websites having full control over what is displayed but the website had to be handmade. The entire point of indie web is to gain back control over your digital life and move away from the centralized web.
