Today marks 15 years since I made the somewhat impulsive decision to start a dedicated website at what was, in many ways, a very low point in my life. While it’s been rather neglected over the past two years, I’ve clearly not given up on it, nor the goals with which I had in originally starting it.
At its core, it’s always been about self expression — the sharing of ideas and creative productions of any form, for those who may be interested. That was the same back in 2007 as it is now, but the scope of the internet has changed and, in many ways, this site has actually become more important for me to realize that idea. The hell that is social media, a concept which, in theory, allows all kinds of people to join together seamlessly, is one of the most divisive aspects of human society to exist, in my view. Instead of unifying, it seems to have allowed most anyone to trivially try to destroy free thought and self expression; a focus on “might makes right” and a demand that the herd mentality be followed (or else) permeates every corner of it.
The traditional web site, by its passive nature, avoids this, save for the occasional idiot in the comments — people have to go at least slightly out of their way to discover new web sites, as opposed to anyone and everyone seeing anything and everything on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, what have you — it’s pushed into as many faces as possible, but never seemingly the faces who you want to see it. It’s intrinsically flawed and an incredibly negative experience. Add in the random fact that the Terms of Service on all of these platforms limit what you can do and seem to be enforced in a very ad-hoc fashion, well, to put it simply people don’t have the ownership of their online identities like they think they do.
A true personal web site like this is different; barring a much less restrictive TOS from the hosting company I use, I can do what I want and say what I want here. Their ideas of liberty seem to be in line with what I feel is reasonable free expression, and for nearly as long as this site has existed I’ve been using the current service provider and had no issues — no “shadow banning” or any claims of violating some arbitrary rule that a million others violate every day with impunity.
Instead, when I feel the urge, I simply type up an entry about whatever I want, on a site that’s running the software I want, with the theme I want, customized by me, with advertisements which line my pockets, not those of some massive tech conglomerate.
Sure, there’s an irony there about the ads being served by Google, or that I pay for this hosting to a major service provider, or any other little thing here or there – I’m not saying no third parties are involved, that would be impossible, but one can look at it this way — the server is the land, and I lease it, with it being tended to by the company I pay, but the “house” — that is to say, this web site, I built myself and have complete control over.
You don’t have that with any other service. Not in the same way.
So, while neglected, that’s what Xadara is, at this stage, its 15th year of existence — digital freedom. In so far as practicality can allow.
This is my digital space, and hopefully soon I’ll get back to using it to its fullest.
Until then, this ends a completely spur-of-the-moment post.
See you on the flip side.