Musings on social media

2026-02-01

I see a lot of people on here decry social media and say they want nothing to do with it, then brandish view counts, "mutual sites", and follow buttons on their web pages. If you turn your web host into social media you aren't really getting away from it, you're just moving it elsewhere. The "indie web" is now just an extension of social media, without the filtering capabilities.

I'm not gonna pretend that I hate social media. In fact, I quite like it... in moderation. I pretty much only use Bluesky and Tumblr, where I block freely and filter out shit I don't like or don't want to see. I occasionally browse Instagram, but it's extremely dogshit and I hate that it's the only place I can see event announcements for concerts and raves. I use Discord for personal reasons, and I don't "get" the community/social aspects of the platform nor the desire to be in group chats with hundreds or even thousands of strangers.

Maybe it's because there's a high concentration of teenagers and kids online these days, but you can't get away from the same discourse surrounding queer identities, pointless fandom drama, and the ever-present concept of DNIs and BYFs that you see on every other shitty website. Hell, I saw someone with "PLUR does not include proship" on their site, as if shipping discourse is the biggest issue at raves when you're surrounded by people wasted beyond reason and can't even hear anyone over the music, anyway.

(For the record, I don't participate in fandoms, I am just a mere "observer" so to speak and know many people who are involved in them.)

Of course, I can't judge minors for making sites -- I was 17 when I initially made my site on Neocities, though this year I will be turning 27, so it's been awhile. However, it's starting to become very jarring and almost disappointing to me when I look around and see myself surrounded by kids, longing for Windows 7 or even XP when they weren't even old enough for that era.

However, I've seen some people with banger layouts based on visual novels like Subahibi and Saya no Uta, but when I look at their site pages I see shit like "my first and favourite anime was My Hero Academia" and I realise, oh... that is a child. Not to judge younger people for being into adult content because it's inevitable and I used to be the same way, but I'm not really interested in entertaining thoughts or discussions around VNs featuring explicit rape and bestiality with minors.

Maybe we need some "old people" webrings?

Anyway, being on Nekoweb does kind of remind me of the discontent that I ended up feeling with Neocities. I wrote this about Neocities a few years ago:

There is no appeal in its "community" of underaged kids and sadgrl templates that makes me want to stay. Of course, there's still decent people around, but if given the choice I'd rather just move on and exist on my own terms. That isn't to say there aren't interesting people utilising Neocities, but as someone who now hosts multiple servers of their own, it just has nothing left to offer me when I have no interest in its social media aspects.

And while I don't have a desire to quit Nekoweb (I no longer host servers for fun as I've since lost interest, and it's more tedious for me), it's interesting that even a site made as an alternative to Neocities still has the same core issues for me -- though I do think Nekoweb at least has a higher percentage of original content, possibly because it seems like a lot of users are also fellow Neocities migrants who are likely already familiar with site building.

I'm starting to think now that it's just the web itself that has shifted, and the damage done by modern social media just runs so deep that you can't get away from it. One thing I've noticed is that "algorithms" have essentially eliminated niche spaces, as everything gets shown to everyone on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok. People who aren't the target audience of said niche spaces (ie. for fetish content) get exposed to it, and are then incentivised to react vocally and negatively instead of blocking the OP and moving on. This behaviour has bled into pretty much every platform out there, and it's really added an element of negativity where people feel obligated to talk about things they don't like instead of things they do. It's fun to be a hater occasionally, but I feel like there's a very fine line before it becomes an actual personal issue.

We live in a very strange era, and I don't think there's really a good general solution or answer for any of this. I somehow get by by focusing only on things that I enjoy and bring me joy online, and I freely ignore/mute/block things that I don't want to see. It's a classic solution: if you don't like it, hit the X button.

Anyway, that's enough of me rambling. February 9 will officially be the nine year anniversary of me having a public facing website. Over the past month or so I have finally returned to actively editing my site again, and today I finally got to redoing my boring site home page (I found the single column layout to be too bland). Hopefully I can keep at it; it's been nice to finally enjoy actively working on it again after several years of inactivity.

Maybe I'll post a retrospective next week? (Famous last words lol)