Under construction dot gif
I was reading I wish everyone had a blog and I started thinking about the web I grew up with, and how I miss it.
I remember being at school and it seeming like everyone I knew had their own website. Geocities wasnāt really the flavour of choice by then, but instead we were using more modern sites like Freewebs (RIP) which featured more of a WYSIWYG experience that suited most skill sets.
My site used the name of a site featured in a TV series at the time, and despite the site not having its own āproperā domain, I felt very grown-up with my own place on the internet to share anything I wanted. Sometimes, it was hard to know what to share, so some pages ended up with a tacky āunder construction!ā GIF, while others had a barebones layout with some half-working embedded features like a visitor counter or a guestbook.
Over time, more of us started using social media platforms like Bebo, me.com (before Apple bought the domain and repurposed it for MobileMe) and MySpace. These new places still allowed for some creativity, but eventually features would become more streamlined and less customisable, before we all landed on Facebook where little could be done to express yourself. As time went on, feeds and algorithms replaced discovery and exploration, and the newer platforms evolved to meet whatever needs remained.
I miss seeing more of peopleās raw creativity, even if the sites were sometimes a nightmare to navigate or were just plain broken. I also miss the thrill of publishing a new page, refreshing the counter to see if anybody was visiting, and showing it off to others during school or by sending a link on MSN Messenger.
I would love to find some of the old sites and pages I published, but it seems a lot of those sites werenāt captured by online archive services. What I would love even more is to see us all step back from predictable social media feeds and addictive algorithms and instead allow us to become excited by the internet again and have more personal outlets, with greater creative control (no matter the skill set).