, several widgets, it was all there! if you had some basic knowledge of html or css you could tailor your profile to your needs and say whatever you wanted to say.
current day social medias are filled with bots, ai slop is starting to get scarily indistinguishable from real imagery, algorithms track almost everything you do online just to pick content to keep you on longer and, worst of all, I CAN'T CUSTOMISE MY PROFILES ANYMORE!
seeing all major social medias slowly turn into the same thing with varying coats of paint has made me yearn for something new, something less restrictive and more customizable.
after complaining for awhile and not really doing much i realised that the answer for what i was looking for was staring back atme daily... a website! a blog! something that isn't a social media!!!!
around the time i got access to the internet on a family laptop i was mostly lurking around forum instead of social medias, some of my earliest online memories are scrolling through the M.U.G.E.N forums finding the most overpowered characters and setting cpu's to fight against eachother. in my efforts to search for the strongest character i had to scower through lots of user accounts, each one heavily tuned to the person behind them. status updates, buttons like these , several widgets, it was all there! if you had some basic knowledge of html or css you could tailor your profile to your needs and say whatever you wanted to say.
nowadays, a 200 something character limit can't even get me started on what i wanna say! and ontop of that its limited to only text... but there still is a large amount of people who use alternatives like strawpage,reentry and many other services to keep this freedom of expression through simple editors, requiring almost no html/css knowledge!
while these tools are great at what they do, most of them are very limited in what you can do. what if you wanted to make something that you couldn't make in those previously mentioned services? what if you didn't want to be tied to and rely on a company to host your page? a company that could theoretically take down anything they seem fit! well, the answer to this is just to build a standalone website! you can make anything you could possibly dream without threat of being taken down! which, amidst lots of recent events taken to censor the internet, is a great plus!
"but... standalone websites for individuals have been around since the beginning of the internet... this isnt a new concept?!" is something you probably aren't thinking right now, but it's a good point that i thought of so i'll assume you thought of it ╮( ˘_˘ )╭
while yes, that is true, due to the simplicty and convenience of social media, the internet has seen a steady decrease in standalone websites being made. there still are communities and webrings that make websites of course, but comparing now, to how it was even in the 2010's, it's clear as day that the majority have moved on from making websites. back then, it was common for most people to have had a blog or something with an RSS feed, detailing their interests or daily life...
learn html! seriously!!! here are some recourses to learn html:
these links should get you started on creating websites, by no means is it an easy thing to jump right into, but having an unrestricted place for your work, portfolio, blog, is something that should be more common place in the internet.
tldr; Make a website