I think now that many live in a youtube/twitter/twitch/facebook/insta sandbox where you can't customize your "space" very much, those days of people crafting their own corner of the internet is really gone.
My daughter is a professional illustrator. I don’t often show her things I learned about on HN, but I just showed her this site and she loves it. She has already signed up and is playing with her new site now.
Yes!! Why not, the website as art? As the medium and the message? A network of creative expression? Or as a "diary" where every entry is more scrapbook-y and less uniform blog?
Honestly, because it takes work. I'm not even talking about technical work, but creative work. To do this well, you want to think about your message and then about how to convey that message not just in the content, but in how the content is presented (sometimes geocities-esque chaos isn't quite the right vibe). Then you need to figure out how to fit that presentation into the assumptions of your web technology (I personally feel like the DOM is a straitjacket, but I'll concede since I don't work heavily in the front-end myself, maybe there are cute hacks that make it less so, short of just making the page a full canvas for something else like three.js)
Anyway, I've developed two "fun" pages myself, playing around with alternative ways to present content on the web:
Neither of them really flesh it out to what one might consider a full website, but are more light-weight experiments in alternative ways webpages can present content.
> To do this well, you want to think about your message and then about how to convey that message
We all have to do some version of this in PowerPoint for school or for our jobs. We can go nuts with PPT transitions and animations, but we usually don't.
This is the same principle. You can use it to make a nice Squarespace like site, or go full lo-fi punk rock zine if you want. IMO that's what computers promised in the '80s and later with desktop publishing software. It's been missing from the web for far too long.
Work? Or time? Hobbies aren't "work"? Time sucked up by FB or Tw isn't work? If that tool / platform gives me a way to expess myself and I want to express myself, that's not work.