do you remember when websites looked different from each other? not just different colors, i mean actually different. weird backgrounds, custom cursors, visitor counters, guestbooks, “under construction” gifs. it was ugly, yeah. but it was alive.

every website felt like someone’s room. you could tell what they liked, what music they listened to, what they thought was cool. myspace pages with autoplay songs and sparkly backgrounds. geocities pages where everyone built their own little corner. messy? yes. but it felt real.

what happened

everything got professional. templates everywhere. same frameworks, same layouts, same fonts. every startup page looks the same now. hero section, three cards, testimonials, footer. you saw it a million times already.

social media

then social media came and told everyone “you don’t need a website.” just post on our platform. we give you a profile. same layout as everyone else, same rules, same algorithm that decides who sees your stuff.

convenient? yeah. but now everyone looks the same. we traded our weird little corners for a feed. and the feed doesn’t care about you, it cares about numbers.

why i made this site

honestly, that’s one of the reasons i built this site myself. not because i’m against templates, i mean i use astro. but because i wanted something that feels like mine. where i write what i want, how i want, without thinking about algorithms or likes.

i miss the internet where people had their own websites. where having a website was like having a voice, not just a profile page.

anyway

i’m not just being nostalgic. the old internet had problems too. but it had something today’s internet doesn’t have: personality. every website was someone’s mind on a screen, not a copy of a template.

maybe we can’t go back. but we can at least try to make things that feel human again. build something weird. make it yours.

we didn’t lose the internet. we just forgot it was ours.