Remember back in the day when people used to build their own websites? Back when WordPress was just a blog, there was a joy in building your own website. The best thing was that Big Tech didn't have their hands in it. Your site was yours. If you didn't like your web host, you could just move your website. There was a sense of joy in picking up a book on HTML and then flipping through the pages, learning how to build a website. It was fun!
I remember going to the library one evening with my mom and finding Make Your Own Web Page for Kids and just being facinated and following along.
It really got me into building sites - my first personal website, a website for the Y-group I was in, sites for my imaginary businesses. And it seemed like other resources got other people building sites and sharing knowledge. So what happened?
If you ask me, I noticed a steady decline in independent websites arouns 2010-2012. This is when social media popped off. While in the MySpace days many of my friends had Geocities websites to compliment their MySpace page, MySpace didn't have the features that sites like Facebook and Reddit created. When Facebook created "Pages" and later groups, that's when it was game over. I noticed so many websites I used to visit close down and move to a Facebook group.
Reddit, which I found looking for a Digg alternative, ended up killing forums. So many sites closed down their forums and redirected to subreddits.
I also hate to say it, but while Twitter was limited (140 characters for the longest time), it too killed off indepenedent websites. If anything, it ended up even killing off blogs. Looking back on my own blogs from 2006, 2007, I used to make short entries.
Eventually, most people forgot HTML. They forgot to be creative. Websites now run on WordPress or Bootstrap. Search engines started treating Big Tech sites better than independent websites.
So how do we rebuild the web? Just do it! Get a book on HTML and CSS and do it. Or you can be like me and use PHP to make things easier. For example, this site I built with HTML, CSS, PHP, and a Markdown to HTML library. That's because I like authoring my pages in Markdown over HTML. This allows me to use any device to create an article or a website page. It's this kind of creativity that I really like and really miss. Because there were a lot of creative people out there building creative websites. If you're one of them, do it.