Personal sites are back

The last time I felt truly at home on the internet, the cursor was a tiny, pixelated slice of pizza and the background was a tiled image of a nebula that didn't quite line up at the seams. We spent a decade convinced that these digital scrapbooks were embarrassing relics, like high school yearbooks filled with inside jokes that no longer land. We traded the charming friction of a hand-coded sidebar for the smooth, frictionless rot of the infinite scroll.

The trade was a disaster. Now, everyone is exhausted by the algorithmic treadmill that demands a constant stream of high-gloss takes and perfectly lit dinner plates. The feed is a shopping mall where the walls move and the exits are hidden. In response, people are quietly retreating to the outskirts, buying cheap domains, and reviving the personal homepage. It is a slow, glorious migration back to the static page.

I am seeing more sites that look like they were built in a dark room by someone who actually enjoys the smell of a manual. They have guestbooks that nobody signs and blogrolls linking to friends who haven't updated since 2022. There is a specific kind of dignity in a weird favicon—a tiny 16-by-16 pixel masterpiece of a cat or a skull—that a verified checkmark can never replicate. These sites do not care about your engagement metrics.

Building a personal site is an act of digital sovereignty. When you write in a text box owned by a billionaire, you are just a tenant farmer working for likes. On your own site, you can be as boring or as eccentric as you want. You can dedicate four thousand words to the history of a specific brand of mechanical pencil and no algorithm will bury you for being niche. The niche is the entire point.

We are rediscovering that the internet is better when it is broken into small, idiosyncratic rooms. I would rather navigate a clunky menu designed by a stranger than spend another minute being fed content by a machine that thinks it knows my soul because I hovered over a video for three seconds. The personal site is back because we missed having a front door we could actually lock.

The best part of this revival is the lack of polish. A site with a broken image link and a font that is slightly too hard to read feels more human than any corporate interface. It reminds us that there is a person on the other side of the screen, likely sitting in a messy room, trying to explain something they love. The feed is for the masses, but the homepage is for the curious. Go build something that doesn't scale.