null1024 null1024The internet has been hyper-centralized, and it sucks. There are less than a dozen big social media megasites that dominate, all of which seek to monopolize your time and ensure that you don't leave while serving ads alongside your posts and media. It really just sucks.
There's a way out. Make your own personal website! Making this site has been extremely freeing, and has let me get away from the constant social media scroll in favor of getting all the things I've done together in one place.
The layout is mine, the words are all mine, I don't have to be baffled at how a site like Twitter (which loads primarily text) takes so long to load, etc, etc. The site is lightning fast (lacking much in the way of anything but text), and I love it. I can set all my pages up in a way that they'll render fairly nicely even in really ancient browsers, too. If I'm in an area with spotty cell service, I can still get to my site and anything posted to it really quickly, unlike any of the big social media platforms that have ended up dominating.
That being said, there are several major issues with running your own site. The biggest one is probably reach. Getting linked to by other people is hard, so you'll probably end up still relying on the various big social media sites for that, and some of them are making it so that posts that go off-site have less visibility. It really sucks and arguably makes those social media sites less useful in general, as it's now increasingly difficult to find interesting things as a result.
Compounding the issue of reach is that you're also quite unlikely to get hits from a search engine nowadays since garbage SEO-keyword spam sites and the big social media platforms end up ranking much higher than you will. At this point, a personal page will be stuck with word of mouth and and discovery via old-school web surfing, going to other personal pages and seeing who else they link to.
One of the other major issues with running your own personal site is that there is a bit of a learning curve to doing it, especially regarding making it look good. I'm probably the wrong person to ask regarding how to learn HTML and CSS, since I've been mucking around with webpages for upwards of 25 years now, and my view on web design is... well, ancient. Way back when I started, you could view the source of pretty much any webpage on the internet and get a good idea of how it was put together (at the time, you had a lot of tables with images for styling). In modernity, most websites are set up in a way that makes this a pretty poor way to learn, although at least there isn't anything stopping you from looking at the source on this website to get a good idea of how to get started. It's laid out pretty reasonably since it's all hand-written HTML and CSS.
Still, I'd still say any real attempt to break the stronghold on the internet is a good one. Make a site. Find other people who are making their own site. Link to them. Spread the good word of making your own personal webpages. And most importantly of all, go visit other personal websites.
I'm not even saying to give up on social media platforms, but having a site that is all your own means that you aren't entirely beholden to their policies, uptime, or desire to suck people in. This isn't a call to be militantly against large social media sites, this is a call to not just be controlled by them.
As of this writing, I'm using GitHub Pages
since they offer free hosting for any static website. There are other easy options, like Neocities, but I've found myself liking GitHub Pages.
One thing I really like is that if any of these hosting services go down, I can easily go to another or even self-host. I made a deliberate choice of just a plain static site, so it doesn't matter who is hosting. You can just re-upload the whole site to your new host. In the unlikely but possible event that any of the major social media platforms go down, you aren't in a good position to get your posts and media back up online anywhere.
Ultimately, the takeaway I want you to get is this: although it can be a bit of effort and you will likely have an issue with reach, having your own website gives you back control over your web presence, allows you to do things the way you want to, and is also very fun.