2024-02-20: retrospring, neo-centricity

i've been thinking for a while about maybe moving off neocities — get a domain, like we used to do, now that (decades later) this is something i can actually do. i already have a couple (personal [real name], & one for a project); what's one more? it's nice to be at a point in my life where i have, you know, a job, a stable income. when i was young and hanging out on the early web my teenage jobs were bringing in not very much money. enough to pay my monthly net access. certainly not much more.

but moving off neocities seems a bit like jettisoning myself into the far reaches of space. there are still websites but very few presences, if that makes sense. these days so few websites are actually handmade, most of them wordpress + theme. billions of similar, beautiful sites with no ass and no soul.

html is hard, but it's really not; we've let ourselves be convinced that it's a pain (which it is), rather than liberating (which it is).

i'm sort of innately distrustful of centralization, of the common, most-used option. back in the day i hopped from site to site — geocities to my local community network, to altern, & elsewhere. and back then it didn't matter. the journal was sort of the surface of the community, your public face. what wasn't seen: all the side chats on AIM, on ICQ, the occasional emails. the friendship that grew in the unindexable point-to-point (and person-to-person) connections.

maybe that's what i miss. so speaking of persons, of connections: just a note that i have a retrospring now; it's been empty since i started; ask me something?

journal