the personal internet
I think I used to like the internet more when I had to decorate it.
Not the internet itself, exactly. I like that I can look up almost anything now. I like that I can talk to someone on the other side of the world, order something without leaving my house, find an answer in seconds. I like a lot of what the internet has become.
But I remember when going online felt less like entering the internet and more like visiting a collection of little places.
There was the Barbie website, where I could spend an unreasonable amount of time playing games. There was Club Penguin, where I had important business to attend to as a penguin. There was MySpace, which somehow convinced an entire generation of children and teenagers to learn bits of HTML because we wanted our profiles to look a certain way.
I was one of them.
I didn't sit down one day and decide I wanted to learn code. I just wanted to change something.
A background. A font. A color. Maybe move something around. Maybe make my page look slightly different from everyone else's. So I learned enough HTML to make that happen.
Then, of course, there was the music.
You couldn't just put anything on your profile. The song mattered. It played when someone visited your page. It said something about you before you got the chance to. So you made playlists, listened through songs, changed your mind, changed it again. Choosing one felt weirdly consequential.
None of this was particularly important.
I think that's what I miss.
So much of my internet now is important.
My email is there. Work is there. Bills are there. Appointments are there. News is there. Shopping is there. Everyone I've ever met is somewhere in there. Social media turned the internet into an audience, and somewhere along the way we learned to package ourselves neatly enough to be shown to one.
Now AI is here too, capable of making the things I once spent an entire afternoon figuring out how to make badly.
The internet became extraordinarily useful.
And maybe, in becoming useful for almost everything, it became harder to find the parts that existed for almost nothing.
I miss websites that looked like someone lived in them.
Pages with terrible color combinations because somebody loved both purple and lime green and saw no reason they should have to choose. Cursor effects. Guestbooks. Music that started playing without permission. Tiny badges announcing someone's favorite band. Blogs with layouts that made absolutely no sense to anyone except the person who made them.
They weren't optimized. They weren't consistent. Sometimes they were genuinely difficult to use.
But you could tell there was a person on the other side.
Today, so much of the internet happens inside the same handful of rooms. We change our profile picture and our bio, maybe choose between light mode and dark mode, and call that customization. Everything else has already been decided for us. Where the picture goes. Where the words go. How big they can be. What you can click. What you can change.
We don't build our rooms anymore.
We make accounts.
And I don't think I realized how different those things were until recently.
There was something nice about having a corner of the internet that required a little tending. Picking the song. Changing the background. Writing something nobody asked you to write. Learning three lines of code not because they would be useful someday, but because you desperately needed glittering text.
Maybe that's why I've found myself drawn to personal websites again.
Not because I want the old internet back exactly as it was. I don't particularly need autoplay music ambushing me every time I open a webpage again.
I think I just miss seeing fingerprints.
The internet I remember was messy and occasionally ugly and full of things made by people who had absolutely no business designing websites.
Including me.
Especially me.
And I think I'd like a little corner of it again.