Building a place that's mine

I'm building a personal website in 2026. That probably sounds more nostalgic than it is.

When I was 15, my friends and I built our own sites. Claiming a little piece of the web, not for an audience, just because it was there and we could. I spent hours browsing link sections and blogrolls, finding tutorials, trying to recreate things I admired. There were no conventions, and that felt like freedom.

Then the platforms came. For a while that was genuinely good: easier to reach people, easier to share. But gradually it shifted from personal to optimized, from people to numbers. The algorithm decides what you see, not curiosity. Everything started looking the same.

Platforms still have their place. I don't miss the old web exactly. But I miss the feeling that a site could be personal. That it could look like the person who made it. That a post didn't have to perform to be worth writing. That you can experiment with something crazy, just because you can.

The tools now are better than they've ever been. AI lowers the barrier. Things that used to require serious skill are now accessible to anyone with curiosity and an afternoon. There's already a small movement around this: IndieWeb, digital gardens, /now pages, blogrolls. People taking back their own corners of the web.

This site is my experiment in that idea. No particular agenda. Just a place that's mine.