Content is King? - How it sucked out the joy of personal websites

Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to Technology@lemmy.world – 130 points –
jeena.net
25

It would be fun to bring back web rings. Alliances of websites that promoted similar content.

Those were the really fun days of the internet.

When surfing the web was actually an adventure and you'd actually discover things.

Not that I could ever go back to dial up speeds, but damn those days were fun.

I'm having this internal debate as well.

I run a blog. I write content and I'm surprised at what gets visits. But I also don't care about popularity. It's a place where I can relay information.

My friends have YouTube/twitch. They're extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job (I did not). But they're so incredibly involved in every single "drama" that every talk about coding with them ends up being about how x-person on Twitter is a jerk or how to game the system.

Seems exhausting, and I wonder if it's worth it.

Same here. At this point I've effectively become an internet 'hermit' and avoid social media. Sometimes I'd even avoid Youtube because of how overstimulating the content are. I don't know how useful this will be for my wellbeing though, since I don't even 'touch grass' either. And yes, I'm autistic so the current state of the web is borderline intolerable for me.

Good for you, I'd consider my online "diet" to be the same, although I do count lemmy and masto etc as social media, just not quite so pernicious as the mainstream corpo ones

I still like to make video content, so I post it on my self hosted PeerTube instance instead: http://tube.jeena.net

That way I'm far awaybfrom fame but also drama ^^

My friends have YouTube/twitch. They’re extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job

That's surprising to me. Are 100k+ really enough to make a living?

On youtube barely, on twitch for sure. Generally you would have more income streams like a patreon and some such. Maybe even merch. If you're doing it all solo, you can easily earn 4-5k per month with these numbers and that's often better than many full time jobs.

How do you count your visits? I don't even see whether mine has visits or not lol. I am not even sure if counting people would count as "tracking", so I am not sure whether it's acceptable in my books. The only feedback I got were a couple of emails.

I found this search engine that helps find non commercial sites. www.marginalia.nu

Might be useful for finding those kind of sites again.

Intersting, I searched for myself and didn't find myself but other people related to the Indieweb community mentioning me there.

You can add yourself for the next crawl via a pull request on GitHub, or simply mail the developer, and he will add you.

I love this search engine. I've already found several new sites that I never knew I needed in my life.

Why not both? I love my site and always work to make it unique. But I also like to write and have “useful” content. Check this out to find more cool things on the IndieWeb https://shellsharks.com/indieweb#explore-the-indieweb

I’ve always considered that I make my personal site for me and write for my own knowledge management. So a lot of my writings are guides on how to do something so I won’t forget.

I’m also not a great writer so I don’t know if I would want the wider internet looking at my stuff

Yeah that's definitely how I approached my site to begin with. A. a place for me to write about stuff I personally want to remember and go back and look at. and B. a place where I could share information I have that I repeatedly tell others. Over time though, I found that people did indeed like to read what I had to say and found it useful. This is always a bit shocking for people who write, it's a great feeling to know others read your stuff haha. I think I'm an OK writer but I certainly have a unique-ish style. The world needs more indie writers with unique voices and styles. Too much of the Internet has become SEO farming trash and AI generated nonsense. Us "real", authentic humans have to take it back.

I absolutely agree on that last point. The web has become so SEO and algorithmically focused and that’s why I’m so all in on the fediverse to put power back into the hands of the people and not whoever can use an LLM to crank out content to exploit the algorithms