I've spent 8 years of my life building websites, but for the past 4 I haven't had one of my own. Why did this happen? When I began learning web development back in high-school, the first project I undertook was to build myself a personal website. What else would I do? I was messing around, I was excited to finally have a space to call my own whose design wasn't dictated by the constraints of Social Media or a block-based builder like Weebly. For a while, that was basically all I did, at one point I had four completely separate and disconnected personal websites, just because I liked the art of making them. And eventually, I ended up getting pretty alright at web development, and I decided to dip my hand into freelancing.
My first "professional" website was a pro-bono job for a now defunct local business, Avid Fitness. It was a pretty rough job, looking back, and it had a brazen overuse of But I'm still proud of getting that faux-blur effect behind the text 5 years before backdrop-filter became standardized across all browsers!background-attachment: fixed. But it was my first real experience designing for someone other than me, and it felt really great to get a foothold in a field I was excited to work in. And hey, I think it was at least better than the site they had before. 🙃
Eventually, my little job began to thrive, and I had a portfolio of 8 or so local business websites under my wing. But honestly, the work started to get tiring, and I started losing interest in maintaining my personal websites in the midst of all of my clients requesting this and that and whatever every week. It was also around this time that I began to realize that the way that I was building for the web was uh... Read: Thrown together using raw PHP and a prayer.pretty bad, and I began to look into other more maintainable ways of managing my clients' websites. Eventually that grew into AuriServe, which just replicated the same maintainability problems but worse because it was entirely proprietary (read more about that mess here), and with all the maintenance burden that that cost, paired with the fact that my personal sites were still just using PHP, I ended up letting them slip into disrepair. By 2020, the only site that was still functioning was the least maintained, still sporting my retro old name and confidently stating that I was 17.
At that point, I had kind of lost the spark for web-development. I was tired of listening to client requests, I was tired of rehashing the same 5-page structure with slightly different branding each time, and I was tired of dealing with stupid decisions I made in high-school that were creating a ton of work for me in the present. So instead of making more websites, I put all of that energy into my games. Things started moving really fast with Zepha, and honestly I wouldn't have been able to keep up with making a website for it even if I had wanted to! (I mean, this is still the official Zepha website as of right now.) So I ended up letting it be, always slightly bothered that I didn't have a website, but never enough to do anything about it.
The Walled Social Garden
It would be wrong to ignore the impact that social media had as well. Nowadays we're all looking at Reddit and Twitter like they just shit on the floor and we have to clean it up, but back then, they were in their prime, and I was really comfortable with them. Social media was convenient, simple, and got my work out to way more people than if I had just posted it unmarketed on my own website. It just didn't make sense to me to make and maintain a new website I didn't want to create anyways when nobody would even look at it.
But that didn't really last, did it? Twitter got bought by a wannabe oligarch, Reddit killed their API and started selling NFTs, and the online community fragmented. And at the same time open standards like ActivityPub and the IndieWeb started to become a niche trend, brought to light by those that were fed up with social media using them one too many times. And I started to think: maybe there's a place for someone like me to have a website again.
I started working on this site almost two years ago, when a friend of mine joined the IndieWeb, and I started eating up all the information I could find on it. I became infatuated with the idea, of the dream of augmenting regular HTML pages with structured data magic to create an interconnected world of indie sites. At the time, I started working on it in AuriServe, and I never really got to the point of doing any actual IndieWeb stuff with it, but it lay the groundwork for this current site, and I hope to find time to poke around with IndieWeb stuff in the future.
ActivityPub and ATProto also caught my attention, making me realize that my site didn't have to be disconnected from the wider social net if I put in the legwork to make it compatible. But at the time, the social platforms using these protocols were really niche, and ATProto wasn't even out yet, so I just earmarked them and focused on other things for a while.
Twitter actually lasted a lot longer after Musk's acquisition than I expected it to. I left incredibly early on, it didn't take much as I had already begun to hate the platform due to the waves of transphobia that were sweeping the site uncontested, so I mostly just sat around waiting to see when everyone else would also realize it wasn't worth being there. People didn't leave when the site was rebranded, they didn't leave when it started surpressing non-premium posters, and they didn't leave when it basically sanctioned hatespeech. But finally this December people seemed to have had enough, and Bluesky started gaining hundreds of thousands of new members, and I realized it might be time for me to return to the social net.
Okay, but if I was going to be lured into a new social media, I wasn't going to let myself be caught off guard like last time. I was lucky enough to start gaining a following only after I left those dying platforms, but many content creators lost huge swaths of followers to the Twitter exodus. I knew if I was going to start investing my time into social media again, I wanted to make sure I was safeguarded against their inevitable fall as well. I'm not so naive as to believe this iteration eternal.
But surprisingly, it seems like this new wave of social media has built an answer to that. Borne, I imagine, from Mastodon championing the decentralized social media space and the widespread distrust of modern social media corporations, Bluesky and the other neo-social media paltforms have all started adopting decentralized protocols that let you host your data on your own personal site. Bluesky even enforces that your handle be a Which is how I snagged @aurail.us as my Bluesky profile. :)domain that you own, or a subdomain of their domain bsky.social.
I see this mechanism as a sort of olive branch to the people that have been burned by the last generation of social media. It's an indicator that perhaps these new social sites won't pretend to deserve such complete control of your work, and your identity. But on its own, I don't see it as enough. Anyone who's tried to collect a data-export from a big website in recent years after they were forced to offer it due to European legislation knows how useless a huge JSON-blob of proprietary-formatted data is when you actually want to leave a platform.
No, if I wanted to exist on social media again, I wanted to make sure that it didn't own me. One of the eleven principles of the IndieWeb came to mind, "Own your data". If I wanted to have a presence on the socials again, I wanted all of my data to be somewhere I own and control first, and only then should it be posted elsewhere.
Own Your Data
But what does owning your data actually mean? It's not enough to just have text files of your posts on your computer, or uploaded to a Dropbox somewhere. Owning your data means that you need to own the actual canonical source of everything you post, which is the first, and authoritive place that your content exists. And that canonical source should be something that you control completely, as much as is possible, and it should be possible to find it easily from any of the syndicated copies of your work.
And that's what this website is.
This website, currently-called-Auri's Den-but-I-should-really-change-it-because-that-conflicts-with-my-Discord is my silo. My canonical source for everything I do, past and future. Because the biggest thing that the old-gen social fallout, Bluesky, and IndieWeb taught me is that we are all worth retaining. Our stupid one off jokes on Twitter, our sketches uploaded to whatever art website isn't being hated for supporting AI this month, our short stories shamefully published to a site under a different username whose password gets forgotten and left behind. That is the beauty humans create, and we need to cherish that even moreso as we move forwards into the increasingly unsteady future. And I hope that I keep that in mind as I continue creating and sharing and doing all the thing that I'm driven to do, as I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.
This site, right now, is young. It has few pages, only four articles, and lacks a lot of the stuff I've created over the past 23 years I've been alive, but it will grow with me. I'll be adding both past and future to it as I find the time, and eventually, it will become an archive of everything that I'm proud of having been a part of. And one day, if I'm lucky, it'll be just as disorganized, chaotic, and full of unswept corners as the passion sites of the early 2000s. Seriously, have you guys seen neocities? That shit's insane!
If that's inspiring to you, and maybe you want to join me on this journey, please do! We only benefit from having more people share who they are and what they've created, especially if it's done in a way that prevents corporate interest from controlling it. Hit me up on Discord if you'd like to chat about web or game dev stuff, and maybe we can start a little web ring =w=
Other than that, though, I just hope that this post helps inspire people to create. The world's been... kinda weird over the last decade, but not all hope is lost. The heart and soul of the world is people being creative and unique and fucking weird in all the ways they can, so don't hold back, be crazy. You can bet I'll be. Godspeed, you freaks! And Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it 🎄
...this site isn't actually any good
Okay, kind of tongue and cheek title, but I do want to address the fact that, despite all of my talk above, this site isn't part of the IndieWeb, ATProto, or ActivityPub. In fact, it doesn't even work right on Mobile or Firefox yet. Just know that stuff is coming, I only have so much time this holiday season and I wanted to get this thing out for somebody to see so I know I'm not crazy. But to spin my shortcomings into a nicely wrapped little moral under the tree, just know that your site doesn't have to be perfect either. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to meet all the accessibility standards, or if you don't know how to properly integrate IndieWeb meta tags, or whatever. That stuff is great, but the only really important part here is you. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
