The Web Still Has Room for the Handmade
The web wasn't always dominated by polished, platform-driven content. In its earlier days, services like GeoCities gave anyone a small parcel of digital land—2 MB, to be exact—where they could publish unpolished, personal pages grouped into thematic "neighborhoods." At its peak, GeoCities hosted 38 million such pages. Owning a website was a way to represent yourself and build connections.
Today, the sheer number of sites is larger than ever, yet the medium feels narrower. Modern tools have made publishing easier but have also standardized it, smoothing away the idiosyncratic, handmade qualities in favor of efficiency. Social media platforms have largely replaced the amateur personal site, and many people have retreated into what writer Yancey Strickler calls the "dark forest" of the internet—a space where authentic public expression is stifled by self-censorship and fear of judgment.
That more personal internet never fully disappeared. Neocities, which started in 2013 as an archive of GeoCities pages, now provides free hosting and has grown to nearly a million sites in the past two years. Institutions such as Rhizome, the Center for Net Art, and the School for Poetic Computation continue to support internet art through exhibitions and workshops. The DWeb initiative, backed largely by the Internet Archive, works toward a decentralized web that users can genuinely own and shape.
The most direct way to join this movement is to build a site yourself. That feels intimidating only if we expect a website to serve as a comprehensive, static reflection of who we are—a resume, a portfolio, a blog. But dropping that pressure reveals a wider range of possibilities. A website doesn't need to be a "home" that answers to everyone; it can be one part of a shared, evolving environment—something that changes and grows, not a fixed destination.
That flexibility opens the door to experiments that would never fit a traditional homepage. A few starting points:
- A website that isn't always awake. Online spaces can borrow the rhythms of physical ones. The retailer B&H closes its website for religious observances. Cloudwatching and Stargazing, two sites by the author of this essay, are only accessible during the day and night respectively. Other experiments expire on their own: the Internet Stoop lived for 12 hours, and Reddit's The Button ended after five days when no one pressed it for 60 seconds.
- A website that's hard to find. Obscurity can be its own reward. Black Room, a browser-based game by Cassie McQuater, sits at a deliberately illegible URL. Default Filename TV aggregates home videos uploaded directly from cameras under their original filenames. Sites like these reward people who actually surf from link to link rather than arriving through search optimization.
- A website without ownership. Some sites function as fictions, separated from any single author. The internet art duo JODI's 1995 site is a labyrinth of ASCII landscapes people wander for hours. The SCP Foundation exists as a wiki for a fictional organization, with thousands of contributors. Neurocracy turns a fictional 2049 Wikipedia into a murder mystery for users to solve.
A more expressive web takes shape once we set aside fixed ideas about what a site must be. That means treating software as an artisanal craft and using everyday tools to push at the medium's boundaries. Rather than concentrating attention on a few huge platforms, a healthier internet might encourage many smaller, personal destinations—and asking friends to join in exploring them. The web is something we all make, and making it by hand is the most direct way to keep it humane.
