Once upon a time, the Internet was an amazing and magical place. There was a real sense of joy when you found a new website or community on the web.
I like to imagine the Internet like a gigantic forest. Inside the forest, there were friendly hermits, small parties of adventurers, and a few little villages. The hermits make up the solo webmasters and bloggers doing their own thing. The adventurer parties are the small groups of friends making forums/boards. Then there were the villages: Gaia Online, Neopets, old DeviantArt, and more.
Finding these small communities with walls of forests between the next felt enchanting, slower, and more intentional. Then came the cities.
Social media. The corporate Internet.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok..
They cleared the land and built walls. Corporate Internet tried to recreate the magic of the forest from within their metal gates.
Those from within the forest chose to live inside the cities. The convenience of the cities brought a whole slew of new faces to the Internet forest altogether. At first, the people loved it.
The cities took out the work of finding other people. It connected people without all the wandering in the woods. The cities were simply built better than the villages. Soon, everyone you knew was there. Those who never entered the forest or had interest in it now lived in the cities.
Then the cities began making rules. Certain social norms became prevalent. The gates that once kept out the unknown now became a prison.
You didn’t explore anymore. The feed decided what you saw.
You didn’t build anything. You posted inside someone else’s walls.
Social media, meant for expression, became the place you lied about yourself on. The image of yourself meant more than the fun of expressing it.
The act of expression in the cities turned into a cruel game of ridicule. Conversations were reduced to sharp one-liners meant to put others down. Winning meant being seen. Being seen meant playing along.
It isn’t over yet. The Internet can still be a magical and fun place, but we need to leave the walls of the city and venture back into the woods. Not for followers, not for engagement, or to monetize, but to just exist.
Not because it’s easy, but because we traded something real for convenience, and most people never noticed.
The only way to bring the magic of the forest back is to create it ourselves. We do that by making our own websites. No, not a social media profile. A REAL website.
Get a webhost.
Get a domain.
Make a damn website.
