As you can tell by the creation of site, I'm making the move to a personally curated Web 1.0 style website. I have decent knowledge in HTML from a course I did a while ago, and Neocities' tutorial was a good refresher for me.
Unlike the Revival of Fan Forums that Goons and SA adjacent twitter users are pushing. I think that personal website have potential, as long as you don't try too hard to be deliberately dated, like a hipster. There are benefit to creating your own website including:
Social Media has really bad in this regard after 2012. Every Profile on a modern social media website now looks the same. Which limits a lot of the character which underlined early social media pages. And that really sucks. While in comparison a personal website gives you a lot of freedom Once you get over the hurdle of Html and CSS.
It's good in this age of the web, to have a degree of privacy from broader discourse Sure It nice, to have social media mutuals and conversations. But what isn't worth it, is going onto TL and being brought into discourse, Which I'll elaborate on later.
I don't how good Neocities will be long term. But with how minimal, the sign up process is You are not giving them much data like with Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. Who sell it off to Advertisers and other 3rd party entities. I had the misfortune of sign up onto Post Google+ Youtube and Gmail.com back in the early 2010s And using having chrome as my main browser for awhile after that. So I'm fucked in that regard due to my igorance
Twitter is a flawed platform, on top of it's prior problems from before the buy-out Including:
Elon Musk's has transforms Twitter into a absolute mess which inverts a given faults to their opposite extreme.
Not a fan of twitter's old verification system, which favored mainstream journalist, and corporations. Lord Elon, will give you twitter verification, as long as you pay 8 bux a month. Defeating the purpose the checkmark and devaluing harder then it already did. And reducing it to a symbol of the site's monetization.
Despite Musk's claims, Twitter is still a censorious platform. Elon has the mindset of bad forum admin who acts sensitively to criticism or opposing partisan viewpoints. And doesn't have genuine respect for freedom of speech. And don't give me shit like the paradox of tolerance or Hoppe physical removal. If you claim to respect Freedom of Speech, then actually do it; Don't intefere with your platform beyond regulating straight up illegal stuff, And so don't act like a powermod when people throw criticisms and general dissent. But of course, Elon doesn't give a shit, because the freedom of speech thing is just an excuse to embolden the right, particularly, the Technocratic, Neoreactionary Silicon Valley types. Which in that case, Elon should just the pretense. Then to claim otherwise.
Tumblr Exodus had the consequence of moving cancel culture or witchhunting, as it was called back in day To twitter. I can't commentate more then what other people have said. But there's clear reversal at play where the right, has a stake in the policing of users, because of misgiving dating back to Gamergate in a twisted Dog eat Dogs kind of way. The Left is still bad in this regard, especially with Pro/Anti split and tendencies we're familiar with. But they're weakened by Twitter shift, and the figures who may have given lipservice to ethics in games journalist angle (or actually embraced it) a decade ago, are now bullies in their own right. Which is see, but's that how pendulum swings when it comes to culture war discourse, and I want nothing to do with it.
But the bigger problems with twitter. Like with Youtube, is pertains to how it manipulates it's Timeline, Trends, and Search Results with algorithms. Twitter is a curated heavily to what Elon wants to show and will manipulate the Timelines of users towards that. Which now, because Twitter added a setting To adjust Timeline preferences. Which had things like AI and other things which Elon fancies, put in by default. Which is a problem if you want to find niche and uncurated content on the site. And avoid the littany of Outrage bait and vain contrarianism which plagues modern twitter. along with botted post.
Twitter is now not only has a vocal minority of mentally ill individual going at eachother. But it's also designed to encourage doomscrolling and perpetuate the mindset outside of niche debates. There's always some drama, or political issue, that Elon wants you to know. And what is better for Twitter and the army of blue checkmarks within it. Then to generate heavy amount of negative discourse for clicks. And that comes to the crux of it, Twitter, like other modern forms of Social Media. Is a more of a revenue platform then it is a platform for communication and sharing. And so every aspect of it's operation is geared to best facilitate that. Elon may say otherwise, he can defend paid checkmark democratization, he can pretend that he's some free speech advocate, and will present himself as a populist. But Twitter is just another means of revenue for him, and a exercise in creating a personal social media for himself, which he can operate like some Latin America dictator. With cronies that he personally favors and a userbase he can exploit.
In Summary, Twitter is a clear Nexus of the share of Modern Issues with social media, more so then Tiktok and Youtube to a extent. It's poorly managed, partisan in opposite direction, heavily skewared towards engagement and revenue generation via it's dating app style subscription, and it's a poor excuse of a free speech platform that go the full mile because it also trying to function as a business. That doesn't we should go back to old twitter, with it's censorship and similarly curated content. But I don't think a content generation platform that's also trying to be free speech platform, without the anonymity of imageboard or pseudymity of forums is a great idea. Musk's twitter is the same old regime as before, and it will operate as such with a false image of populism and free speech.