For whatever reason, a ton of companies that run websites and other services have opted to actively screw over their userbase by doing things like killing off third-party apps by making the API pricing absolutely insane even for companies with millions to spend on, so they end up killing off any kind of integration that exited with that site prior. And then there’s just the actions taken within the services that make them even less usable by the day, regardless of whatever app or webpage is being used, even and especially official channels. Whether this is some sort of financial thing brought on by ad revenue to force the companies into some kind of last ditch effort, or a conspiracy within Silicon Valley that’s tied into several other corporations as well as the governments of the world that’s designed to bring on a new world order of total oppression, or perhaps both of those and more, one thing is for sure. The interface of the web that started getting popular around 2003-2005 or so is dying off pretty quickly, and I’m not sure what’s going to replace it, if it’s worth replacing.
There are alternatives out there, but the current rush to abandon sites and services that are falling apart means that the distribution of people on serviceable alternatives are spread pretty thin, and there’s also some reluctance to commit to any specifically in case it end up going under due to lack of funding or becomes too big for its own good, as many long-running sites tend to do. Or maybe they’re just total garbage to begin with. Social media is a difficult thing to run correctly, with considerations to server costs and having an approach to free expression without becoming a haven for future mass murderers. I’ve just opted to generally go without until I found out Cohost existed, and even then I’m not entirely committed. I’m backing up my posts as I make them in case things go wrong there. There’s Mastodon which is pretty much a distributed sort of Twitter alternative but with different things going on with each community that might be able to communicate with each other. I haven’t messed with that yet as I haven’t felt up to figuring it out and I swear any time I try to look at a server it’s just the exact same mess that made me leave Twitter well ahead of that current mess. Then there’s the consideration of Discord, which I’m not sure what alternatives people are betting on whenever that does something horrible. The username thing may have just been the start of something far worse that probably already started somewhere much earlier. I just hope whatever people pick doesn’t require a phone number, because I hate giving those out because it just gets me more spam calls. As well as not requiring some blockchain nonsense, because it already takes long enough to get account activation emails sometimes, so I’d rather not have to deal with additional processing time and somehow exorbitant fees tied up in things.
The major thing I’m going to once again mention is that making a website just keeps getting more relevant to have any kind of online presence, especially when accounts elsewhere can be wiped for being inactive for a relatively short time, like a long vacation or being a prisoner within a hostile area. I’m also going to insist that people actually look into this. Mess around with some free options at first to figure out what to do with a website, whether it’s going to be a gallery, a store, or just a mess of random stuff like mine is in the spirit of the old web with some modern touches like using CSS and whatnot. Then either those free options might be sufficient or maybe a paid host could work better. I don’t really know about other hosts aside from Neocities, which has both fairly generous free and paid options, so research is also needed there. Maybe ask others who have websites of their own. Or maybe even go the route of self-hosting.
Learning HTML and JavaScript and CSS can be weird, but there are templates for those not wanting to dive deep into that at the moment. I’m working on setting up template scripts in Python for convenience with adding to this site, including typical pages I make such as this one and later one for the reviews, where I’m currently working on figuring out the formatting I’d want to apply and how to set that up in the script. It’s something I should have probably done before, as it’s just automating what I was already doing, copying old pages as a template and putting in the new content. At least I’m not getting some weird generative thing that makes up random stuff to do things here, these ramblings are my own. At some point I’m planning to post previous generated stuff I’d done for the sake of just showing how I experimented before. But for now, I’m just doing whatever it is I usually do at the moment.