The Moment we begin, we than beginn

Last year, at the Beyond Tellerrand conference, the first seeds were planted for what has now become my new – or rather reincarnated – blog. I left Düsseldorf with a pile of motivation, especially after the closing talk by Tantek Çelik and his reasons for running your own personal website. But then – you know – life happend and it took almost another year until I got going …

I rewatched his talk recently to get back into the right mood, again. Tantek warned that all those networks out there form kind of a corporate content, which they are in total control of as a company. Medium, for example, attractive for their great design, puts your content behind a paywall, without you being able to have an influence on this. Twitter sorts your timeline the way they want and Facebook accepts hate speach and misinformation only to keep people engaged with their network. Leaving you as a user enraged and sad.

In short, we as people of the web should take back some of the control we lost to those networks. And the best way to do that is to build your own website.

As Tantek puts it:

Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.

The Web is our social network. As designers and developers, we are able to build our personal websites quite easily. Together with webmentions, explained on the IndieWeb website, we can connect our websites, share our views, and build a community without relying on coporate social networks.

Tantekt went on with some good live examples of webmention usage and some great arguments for maintaining a personal website. He mentioned a really long article titled »Into the Personal Website-Verse« by Matthias Ott, absolutely worth reading. Matthias says:

There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website.

Rachel Andrew puts it in similar words and writes:

As we move our code to CodePen, our writing to Medium, our photographs to Instagram we don’t just run the risk of losing that content and the associated metadata if those services vanish. We also lose our own place to experiment and add personality to that content, in the context of our own home on the web.

Sara Soueidan’s agrees with that, saying:

My fave part about my own site is I get to use it to experiment w/the latest & greatest features. I learn many things by applying them on my own site first.

Jens Oliver Meiert make some points for running your on website, and I guess it is no accident that he published this article at the beginning of the new year, being in line with some (at least mine) new years resolutions.

So, packed with all those good reasons there were no excuses left to not get going, maybe one, but Marc covered it on his about page:

Are people interested in what I am going to write? Who is going to read what I write? You know what? It doesn't matter. I am writing this down for me. If you find something useful, something inspiring and/or enjoy reading: perfect!

And with this, I start. If someone reads it, great, if not, I learn something, at least, writing it down for my future me.

To begin, begin!

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