[superultra]

I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress.com, etc.

The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms can provide, so most people that would have a personal blog just aren't.

I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be disappointed with "engagement."

A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech, it needs a mindset reset.

[asdff]

I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you are a fool, since they can point to their massive populations of sheep that already believed their lie as some sort of justification for why they are right. In reality, its easy to code. Its easy to set up self hosting. Its easy to write your own html. It probably takes as long for you to get up to speed with the basics of these things as it does for you to learn some gui tool that you have to pay for somehow to do a very limited set of these things.

I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics of programming and data science than it did to get so proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7 year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that means you can too with just a little bit of patience. Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.

[Karrot_Kream]

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're right, basic coding skills are easy to learn. Much like basic accounting, basic DIY skills, pretty much the basics of anything. But not everyone finds it interesting.

I have a friend who's quite technically savvy and has been on the net since the early '90s. He used to maintain a website but once social media came along, he was gone with the wind. I asked him recently if he ever wanted to go back to posting on a personal blog and he said no, he found the minutiae in writing content, hosting, maintaining, etc to be boring and a waste of time even if he was only spending 10 min a week on it, given that he was mostly just interested in interacting in small comment-like bursts on online forums. For chatting with known friends, he's in group chats and Discords. He just doesn't find the value on having a personal website. I suspect most people don't either.

[nickstinemates]

To add to this, centralization has been such a big part of the past 20 years with Social Media that it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It has and continues to be an "and" proposition -> social media presence + "personal"/brand/corporate/? website must go hand in hand.

The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of typical mind share and opportunity.