Why make a website, from scratch, instead of just posting all of my content on social media? If you find yourself asking this question, I want to portary to you the reasons why you should have a website.

I’m sure most people who were born in the last couple decades were around for the total and complete crash of Twitter, and its transformation into the engagement farming hell we all know and despise today: X, and the resulting splinter of mass amounts of people to different networks. Networks such as Bluesky, Nostr, Mastodon, Threads, and some, well some people have left social media altogether. And, you know, sometimes you can’t really blame ‘em.

Thing is, when these sites eventually go down, or when you get banned for stepping outside of bounds set by some arbitrary corporation, or fall into the crosshairs of an overzealous Mastodon admin, what happens? You lose everything.

One of the biggest reasons you need to have a website, especially if you’re a creator (artist, musician, writer, etc), is because nobody can erase your website. Even if the server you’re hosted on goes down, you still have it on your hdd, and hopefully, you’ve backed it up somewhere else, too.

Set up automated backups on your machine, update things daily. Write articles, write something fun. Put the things you make on some pages you hacked together in a day. Whatever. If you do these things, you won’t ever have to think to yourself, “Oh no, Twitter might ban me for being transgender, what do I do if I lose all of the content I’ve worked ten years on curating?”

You don’t. You shouldn’t need to do anything. You should have everything you’re doing and working on hosted, in your own spaces.

Yahoo was correct when they made Geocities, and they should’ve never taken it down.