existing on the internet

I deleted Instagram off of my phone again a few weeks ago. I won’t tell you the screen time that I was logging, but it was an embarrassing amount. It was the last of a series of social media apps that I’ve been slowly trying to disentangle myself from. I don’t want to keep coming back, but you know how it is...

The FOMO sets in again, and I wind up redownloading, wondering what messages I must have missed, and whether someone important has been trying to reach me. Every time I come back, it’s usually nothing but a stack of memes from my partner and 3 other friends who usually text me on a regular basis anyway.

I try to check in on old coworkers and friends, aggressively liking their 3 week old posts. But as you know, very quickly, the capitalism takes over, and it either tries to convince me to buy something trending that no one on the planet needs, sucks hours out of my life with addictive junkfood content, or feeds my existential dread about the impending whatever-apocalypse.

When you're an artist, it's worse. It reminds me just how much more successful I could be if I was committed to hustling around the clock.

Look at this other artist with hundreds of thousands of followers! And look at you with your measly 300. What do you expect when you only post once every 7 months...

It's not sustainable to devote your creativity to appeasing these platforms. I wanted to become an artist because I love the process that unfolds, and the way I can get an idea out of my head and into the world. Instagram forced me to focus on the results and the numbers. I've had a taste of virality on TikTok... It's uncomfortable. Even though I didn't recieve any hate, the sheer amount of people who saw it, who brought it up to me as something that showed up on THEIR feeds? It made me paranoid. I realized very quickly that I didn't want that kind of attention.

Not just that, but the knowledge that every bit of all freely uploaded artwork is being scraped by bots without our consent. We put all of this hard work into making something we're proud of, only to have it ripped off and mutilated by tech companies. It's totally baffling to me that people think that there's any fulfillment to be made by producing fuckloads of art at breakneck speeds. That's NEVER been the appeal for me. The fulfillment comes from the resulting therapy of expressing myself. Art helps take some of the pain of being alive during this weird time in history away. It's a way to stay sane.

When I found out about Neocities and that people were re-engaging in old school web design, I realized right away that this is what I've been wanting, however... It's a bit quiet here. Not dead in the fact that no one is here, because it's absolutely flourishing with incredible websites. But no one I know is using this, or has ever heard of it. By choosing to move all of my internet activity to a personal website, I will likely lose that "staying in touch" factor that social media provides, which is true. However, fewer and fewer friends post anymore. Important events reach me in other ways now. The apps have created this dynamic by suppressing us. We reacted by sharing less and less.

Plus, do I want to be a person who receives updates about someone's life informally, through a story? Or do I want to be that friend who gets direct text messages, emails, phone calls, maybe even the old school snail mail? Social media feels lonely in that regard, because the interactions are so low effort and easily lost to other forms of content.

Actually, my dream is for all of my friends to get on board with personal sites so we can all link up together, but that's not realistic. Being a coding nerd is relatively a niche thing, and even more so, people don't always like creating content as much as they enjoy consuming it. I'd heard a statistic that only 5%-ish of users actually create content. Not sure if that's true, but that checks out.

Also, I like that it's quiet here. No ads. No AI slop. No competition for attention. I can do whatever I want here. I can CHOOSE to tally metrics. I can choose to have comments. I can reorder the artwork without having to delete and reupload it. I don't have to follow a schedule. I don't have to make the grid look cohesive. I can change the fonts, the colour palette, the background. I can be as public or as private as I want to be. I can even take all of my code and move it elsewhere if something happens to Neocities.

So that’s it, I decided, I’m getting off the major social media apps. Not just removing the app. Hard delete, no take-backs. Not off the internet entirely. Just elsewhere.

Getting back into coding, I was reminded just how much I love web design. With my job over the last 13+ years, I built websites on so many modern web builders, I forgot how much I actually love coding. It’s slower. It takes more time to figure out how to make it “do the thing.” But when it does, it’s *mwah* just soo satisfying.

My problem with modern web builders is, aside from the fact that they were always breaking, they’re expensive. I paid a monthly fee to show off my fancy design portfolio while I was job hunting. Once I’d get hired, I’d yank the whole thing down and bury it. I wasn’t going to use it again, because ideally, by the time I’d need a new portfolio, the contents would get refreshed anyway.

The traditional graphic designer’s portfolio is usually so lacking in personality. It's what most companies want. They want to see your work, not YOU. They want to see how well you conform. I'm an artist before I'm a graphic designer. Thankfully, my current job hired me explicitly because I wasn't afraid to put myself above the work in my portfolio. I wanted people to know WHO they were hiring, not just whether I could do the work. Because I am not for everyone. I've not always fit every workplace culture, and I wanted to prevent that from happening again.

I've reached the point in my career that I think I'm ready for a personal artist website. Not just a portfolio, but a junction of all of my projects. My writings, my paintings, my illustrations, my crocheted pieces, my photography, my stories, my garden.

I wanted to build my site in such a way that would keep me coming back to it. If I’m willing to waste X number of hours a week scrolling on Instagram, then I should be able to take that time and put it towards something meaningful to me.

This site design is inspired by scrapbooks, zines, and girlie mags. I think back to all the magazines I got in the mail when I was a kid, and I wish I’d kept them. They were splashy, playful, and consistently inconsistent. When it’s a website just for you, you do NOT have to treat yourself like a brand. You aren’t. You’re a messy, complex person who WILL change their mind, repeatedly. So that’s what this is. This is the kind of internet I miss, and I love that it's still here.

I know, not everyone is capable of making a website like this, even if they really want to. I’m only good at it because it’s my job AND my hobby, but I hope that by having made it, that I can inspire others to give it a go. I know that it's not a perfect alternative to social media apps, and there's a lot of positives to being on Instagram and Facebook, but for me, the choice is made easier by the fact that this is so much more rewarding. Who knows how I'll feel about that in the long term, but for now, this is my solution and I'm really excited about it.

To those who see my site and think "how do I make one myself?", I will be working on a resource page on how to build your own site on Neocities. But you don't have do it the same way as I am, there's certainly other website builders out there that will be easier and faster for non-coders that won't cost you, and I'll try to gather those on that page as well.

For anyone who has a dream project of any kind... You aren't too old, it's not too late, and you can learn something new. If it means a lot to you, if it's what you've always wanted, you should try. Time slows down when you are living passionately. You may even heal yourself through it. Engaging in something you love may even help you live longer! I believe in you.

Thanks for reading.

Love, Fanny