for my honorary first blog post (and for testing purposes), i will explain what i was thinking by making this website and why you should make a website too.
social media platforms such as tw*tter or f*cebook are obviously great for meeting new people and socializing, but not very useful for any sort of long-term archival of anything. people on those sites come and go, as do website features. what's there one day is gone the next. even old forums still exist which allow you to search decades worth of old posts in a relatively simple way, but good luck searching for something you posted on tw*tter just a couple weeks ago because that site doesn't let you sort/tag anything.
not only is it impossible to keep or look up older content on social media, but these platforms don't even listen to you. they treat you like a product, violate your privacy, sell your data, don't have the features users want (like chronological posting or adult-only accounts), either don't have useful privacy features or just plain don't care about proper moderation, and they change their features seemingly on a whim without care for what the users actually use the site for. what comes to mind currently is inst*gram changing from a photo sharing app to try to mimic tikt*k, a video sharing app, despite the protests of many artists and photographers. i personally use inst*gram very little, but am still enraged for the thousands of users who used the site heavily, whether for recreation or trying to earn a lievlihood on there, who will be left without a better place to go thanks to these thoughtless decisions. people used to be attracted to websites for their different usages and the different kinds of users on each one, but now it seems like every platform is trying to be like everyone else.
relatedly, restrictions against adult content are mostly taken in efforts to protect minors or to comply with new laws, so i can't really comment on it much except to say that a lot of the fault there lies with the conservative direction that people want to take the country because times are rough. you look at websites from japan for example and they're nowhere near as uncomfortable with adult content as american ones are, and i'm guessing this is in part because they are blessedly free from the old puritanical ideals that the u.s. started off with. i don't know what it is exactly, but i will say that t*mblr was my home for a long time when i was younger and i thought it would be around forever back then. it was so successful and the users were so free. but then they banned adult content and it became a ghost town. to ban 18+ content completely is not only lazy moderation, but also a lazy sense of morality. it's to restrict the imagination of any human being from their own natural curiosity and desire to explore their identity. i really hope this isn't the direction the internet is going in the future, but i'm not optimistic.
not only does social media suck up all your time and attention in ways that are difficult to manage, but it's not even as fun as the old web was. you can't customize shit, you just fill in the fields they give and you can't add anything more. and if they have dumb rules about not writing unrelated stuff in the 'location' box, then tough luck because you might get suspended if you don't obey. personally, i like tw*tter and have fun there from time to time but every day that i use it, i feel my soul rotting in ways that i didn't when i was just surfing geocities websites as a kid. social media encourages people to fight and turn nasty, it brings out the worst in everyone for the sake of more views, more attention. i see people saying things on tw*tter that drive me to drink, things no one should be talking about to other people, and certainly not strangers. don't even get me started on young people listing all their personal information on c*rrd profiles or entering adult spaces to harass people for no good reason either. whatever happened to basic internet safety - not giving such personal info out randomly, not talking to strangers, not talking to random adults when you're just a kid? some people say social media sites paid everyone to shut up about internet safety, or something like that... it would make sense.
so how do we escape all this nonsense? most social media is irredeemable because they need venture capital or ad money and the user ends up being just a product to them. you need to get on social media that only accepts money from its users (such as dreamwidth or pillowfort, which are both kind of quiet for different reasons at the moment) or you need to leave the social media scene entirely. remember when i said i considered t*mblr my home before? many people in my generation or younger are not likely to ever be able to afford a house in real life, that's what i think. i don't care about that or any of the typical milestones of adulthood, i'm happy just to have shelter in a rapidly declining world like the one we live in today. but what i would like /at the very least/ is a place where i can be myself and show who i am to others online, without all the limitations of social media. a website is the place to do that. a website can be your house, the place where you are free and no one can tell you what you can't do. it really feels like a place, an actual location, and that's why groups of websites on geocities had names like 'fashion avenue' or 'television city'. tw*tter was meant to be a temporary refuge for me until something better came along, never a permanent home. but now i've built one that i hope lasts for a long time. as a webshost, neocities seems to be a much more stable platform to build on that anything else resembling social media. i'm so glad it's here, and i hope more people find out what they've been missing and make a 'home' for themselves too.