a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
Before you build a house, you first need land. Likewise, to build an online identity, you must find a place to stay.
Social media can be beneficial. It can be a wonderful place to meet new people. Even with the downsides of social media taken into consideration, there is plenty to be seen, and plenty you will miss out on if you leave.
Some people will tell you it is a moral failing if you do not "just leave" social media. The reality is that this isn't feasible for every person. There are healthy ways to use it, though, and unhealthy ways to use it. Do you feel like you have been collared and leashed?
This is not a guide for leaving social media or lessening your social media use. But to justify making a website, one must first point out why social media is not a viable option for everybody.
So why not? Here are some common anti-social media arguments.
When you use social media, you invest your time, photos, personal thoughts & opinions into one place. Even if you don't post, you no doubt browse. On social media, there is always something to come back to, and always something new waiting for you. This demands your time and attention.
Eventually, you reach a point where "sunk cost fallacy" gets its hands around you. If you leave now, your friends will miss your posts, and you will miss theirs. If you leave now, all your old posts will be meaningless. This is not a stupid concern.
Most social media demands daily interaction: daily posts & daily use. The more you scroll, the better. Some of them might be ads, after all, and that makes the company behind it money.
Most of these services are designed to keep you addicted in order to extract more out of you. You are pushed into this relationship on purpose. I repeat: you are pushed into this relationship on purpose.
On most social media platforms, the user only gets an avatar to express themself with. If you are lucky, you will get a banner. On platforms like Discord, you have to pay for that honour.
The more one's self-expression is restricted, the less creative one becomes. When one is not exercising their creativity, it slowly withers away, which means boredom will more readily be alleviated by scrolling The Feed.
On Twitter, for example, there is a character limit to posts. You cannot express yourself in more than 280 characters, which might be fine if only it were a conscious decision.
On social media one must comply with the platform's standards, too. This means that, usually, you are unconsciously be putting on a mask to hide yourself. I repeat: you are unconsciously putting on a mask to hide yourself.
Why does social media want you on it for as long as possible? The answer is simple: because the longer you are using it, the more it gets to analyse the way you use it, and then that information can be used in terrifying ways.
How long you look at one post, whether you like it or not, the way you comment on it; what languages you speak, what topics you are interested in, what your gender and age is; all can be estimated through careful observation.
Men whose faces and names you will never learn have devised a way to turn you, a real person, into many data points. They then compare your data with other people's, sell whatever information they can gain from that, and as a reward they might let a robot with no sense of empathy hand you posts you might like just a little more.
If you're satisfied, you will leave, therefore this robot is not even allowed to serve you content that satisfies you. I repeat: this robot is not even allowed to serve you content that satisfies you.
On Facebook, Meta will deliberately serve posts that will negatively affect one's emotional state. On Instagram, they purposefully serve posts encouraging eating disorders and self harm. On Twitter, the website is now structured so that one becomes addicted to crafting posts merely to make other people angry. On TikTok, there is fashion discourse every other day.
Outrage drives clicks, which drives engagement, which means more data can be sold and more ads can be served. This makes money.
The app does not care that you are being mentally harmed. I repeat: the app does not care that you are being mentally harmed.
Twitter has Grok; TikTok has Tako; Facebook and Instagram have Meta AI; the question is, what are these artificial intelligence robots training off?
The answer is you: you, the user and the product, are constantly feeding into robot chatbots for absolutely zero reason. These bots are subpar, anyway—they hallucinate, they repeat themselves, they pollute the environment and waste precious water and electricity. Nothing they say is factual.
Next time somebody talks to that artificial intelligence, it might be wearing your face. I repeat: the artificial intelligence might be wearing your face.
Ultimately, it is your choice whether or not to use social media. As a rule, websites are better than applications, and some are less harmful than others.
With your very own website you can do any sort of "posting" you might have done previously, and as a bonus, you can cut out all the cruft. There is no "Terms of Service" on your own code.