In the age of seemingly endless social media options, what's the point of making a personal site? The answer's in the question, babyyy.

Tumblr shit the bed in 2018 and hasn't yet regained many fans' trust, especially for those of us who create NSFW fanworks. They're also looking friendly toward AI. So is Wordpress. Twitter, which almost nobody wants to call X, is owned by a fascist billionaire manbaby. More and more, the places where fans can gather seem to grow hostile, and the more marginalized we are, the more true this is.

There are still cool fanspaces around. Dreamwidth is alive and kicking. Pillowfort is my favorite alternative, and somehow the least popular. Bluesky looks promising, even if it will come with many of the same issues as Twitter.

AO3 is the most popular collective hub for fanfiction, but its continued unwillingness to address racist harassment on the site and the OTW's silencing of members in support of Palestine (but not those in support of Zionist Israel), coupled with its stance on AI-generated fanworks, leave me wary. I love the AO3, but its failures add up. At the very least, I want a backup plan.

As I've learned from fandom purges past, it's never a good idea to host everything in one space. Whether it's the platform's policies, a webhost going under, or your own PC causing troubles, there's always a risk of loss. If you love something, save it twice!

I also miss the decentralized web. I don't think weird individual websites can, like, solve capitalism, but I do think they're a tiny piece of the puzzle of reclaiming webspace for everyday people rather than corporations. If you're interested in the more serious and political side of it, I've linked some writing on it here.

Finally, there's the good old fashioned nostalgia. I miss glittery eyesores devoted to single characters or whole archives of fanworks. I miss crunchy web design and fans with more passion than know-how. It's fun and silly and I'm having a great time relearning HTML and CSS.

And I'm not just making my own! I'm encouraging you to make something. You can find a ton of resources out there, including layout designs, graphics, and even guides for learning or relearning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and so on. I've catalogued several of those right here to get you started.