So You Wanna Get Back In The Internet Game
🧨🤯 Damn, What A Week On The Internet! 🤯🧨
I feel like I’ve had a month’s worth of internet thrown at me in the past week or so! 🙀
Between Neil Gaimain’s garbage (major trigger warning: SA) 😬, Trump endlessly trolling Canada by saying he wants to annex us 🙄 and signing an executive order that there are “officially” only two genders 😡🔪🩸, Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta’s about to stop moderating and let shitlords take over their platforms 😒, the US Supreme Court hearing about new American “age-gating” internet porn laws 🤬, and now Elon giving a Nazi salute at Trump’s presidential inauguration 🤯, my head is SPINNING!
But something else I saw, was a good number of folks in my sphere say that they were leaving Facebook or Meta-owned social media platforms completely! Hallelujah! Finally! I really hope they all have enough integrity to mean it because I’m tired of these platforms holding us hostage and keeping us all from growing!
I posted this meme on Facebook last week, that I made in 2022 after Elon bought Twitter and I saw all my cryptoartist friends wondering what to do next:
I can’t share this meme and advocate for the internet proper over social media enough, and I am beyond pleased to have also read that Wil Wheaton is leaving Facebook in favour of returning to his long-running blog! That was like seeing a crocus pop out of the snow after a long winter!
Even better is that I’m inspired by how many of my OG internet friends have lamented that we all might as well flex our internet skills and go back to building websites in HTML than be on social media! To which I say: YES, FUCKERS! DO IT! LET’S GOOOOOOOO! LET’S START WEBRINGS!
As a Canadian, I literally can’t even post the links to the news articles at the beginning of this post on Facebook! There’s literally no better time to start a website!
After I shared my meme on Facebook, OG Portal 9 camgirl Zofia, posted this comment:
To which I replied with basically, how my website works, the companies and products I use, and what it costs per year, because Zofia is thinking along the same lines I have been for a while:
We, the former netizens of the world, need to stop being so fucking lazy, stop doomscrolling on billionaires’ platforms, and take our internet back by building and going to websites again.
People read all these scary, clickbaity headlines about generative AI and LLMs, ChatGPT and the like, ruining our lives and internet, and what do they do about it? They argue about it on a billionaire’s platform, or share a meme on a different billionaire’s platform, while increasingly, the internet outside those walled gardens, that most people stopped using with the advent of Facebook, is being replaced with AI-generated muck and disinformation bots. Do I really have 1600 followers on Twitter? Or are they literally all bots? 🤔
Instead of sharing yet another meme on Facebook about how anti-AI you are, you actually start a website – about literally anything, the more mundane and niche the better – and fight back by trying to put out as much human-made content based on experience as you possibly can, to hopefully drown out the “out of the can” AI-generated nonsense everyone’s so fearful of taking over?
By only posting content on social media platforms, and none of it your original own content, you are guaranteeing the very thing everyone’s so afraid of: a dead internet.
The fact is, AI is here and it’s not going anywhere. The genie has been let out of the bottle. It’s already in the fabric of our lives, like microplastics, whether we want it to be or not and I think it will only be humanity’s greed and laziness – or our greed and industriousness depending on how you look at it – that will be our downfall. (If there is a “downfall of humanity due to AI”. I think climate change might get us first, unless AI can help us fix that…what’ll come first, Chicken Little, the chicken or the egg? 😵💫💫)
No matter what you want to make a website or blog about, in 2025 it is like doing a small service for humanity in my opinion. Like having babies or leaving to colonize your own planet when humanity starts dying out.
There is a place for everyone and their interests on the world wide web beyond social media because 67% of the world is on it. Unlike any given social media platform that only has a fraction of that potential audience/friend pool/creator pool/what have you, where you’re fighting against an algorithm that’s only showing your content to a fraction of those people.
Despite what the billionaires would have you believe, only ~37% of internet users are on Facebook, ~36% on Instagram, and ~11% on Twitter (never X). Why limit yourself like that? Why not be discoverable by everyone?
Plus, you can’t post consistently and cultivate community on all of the social media platforms at the same time, as a team of one, while remaining sane and authentic. I’ve tried, you’ll just burn out and make yourself nuts! So why not make the “platform” you focus on be your website? Either again or for the first time?
The better generative AI gets, the more important “digital provenance” will become.
Eventually, the internet will be full of websites created by people using generative AI, either deceitfully or in an attempt to be creative, that’ll look like they’re run and written by completely different people in order to get traffic, accolades, and ad views. The photos will be of the same person doing different things and will look like it’s all a life being lived and written about by a human, but it’ll really be someone using AI to create the illusion of that. It’ll be like a fictional website. That’s why it’s important to start building and preserving your digital provenance now, especially if you’re young and don’t currently have any.
What is “digital provenance” and why is it so important?
“Provenance” refers to the origin or history of something, particularly its ownership, or creation, or development over time. It’s used a lot in art, wine, and antiques to verify authenticity and trace a thing’s background. I first learned the word in 2021, when I was immersed in NFTs, because digital provenance is very important when buying and selling NFTs, especially for large sums of money.
Digital provenance is proof you are who you say you are online, through your digital footprint.
For example, I have a long history online. If you Google me, I’m in the results up to 5 pages. You can see my Twitter account was started in March 2007 and I have 60.4k dated tweets to back that up. You can use the Wayback Machine to verify that this website was created and maintained by the same human being for the last 20 years, as well as the website I had before it. My LiveJournal dates back to 2001! And if that’s not enough, my Angelfire site still exists and it shows that it was last updated in the year 2000:
AI can’t fake any of that, so on an internet increasingly full of AI-generated content and fictional websites for AI catfish, I am veritably a real human being, who has been putting out the same kind of content since at least 2000.
Many of the folks reading this have a rich digital provenance and are veritable humans the same as me, and I believe real humans will be in higher demand for engagement, entertainment, and expertise on an AI-saturated internet.
So You Wanna Get Back In The Internet Game
When I tell people they should build a website, I often hear, “but I’m not tech savvy” or “I don’t have the right equipment” or “I don’t know what to make content about” and I’m here to tell you “doesn’t matter“, “yes you do“, and “literally anything.” You’re human, aren’t you?
These days, maintaining a website is easier than running a YouTube channel, and even more global. I’m also pretty sure you can build and maintain one on a tablet, and it can literally be about potatoes that look like Elvis, if that’s what you’re into. It’s also punk AF, like making and distributing a zine, because it’s yours, it can be (almost) anything you want it to be, and if you’re the one paying for the hosting, no one can take it away from you or pull all your content out from under you for no reason (or without explanation). As long as you keep things legal, there’s no such thing as “website jail”. Say whatever the fuck you want!
As far as tech-savviness, in 2025 you don’t need a computer or know how to use super fancy software, and you certainly don’t need to know any code. A whopping 43% of the internet’s existing websites were built and are maintained in WordPress! (And Shopify works the same way as WordPress, if all you want is an online store! 😊)
Do you know what “the kids” build with HTML these days?
Niche websites that look exactly like yours did in 2003.
If you want to hand-code a website in HTML and CSS, and you still have the skills to do so, by all means, knock yourself out, those are awesome! But if you don’t know HTML or CSS anymore and feel like it’s too late to learn or relearn everything, and if you just want to have a voice, history, and “home” on the internet outside social media where 68% of the world is vs…I guess, not having one, WordPress is probably the easiest way to go about it.
WordPress is a content management system, built on a bunch of different kinds of code like HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. It controls the framework of your website and organizes your content into Pages and Posts.
To build the website, you install WordPress on your server, then login to your WordPress Admin page (your site’s “back end”) on the internet, and tweak the Theme to make the site look how you want. Then you create Posts that show up on your blog (what you’re reading right now), or Pages that are more “fixed”.
For example, a Post can show up within a Page, but a Page can’t show up within a Post. This took me forever to figure out, so hopefully I can spare you some pain. 😅
Customizing and learning a new WordPress Theme is a lot of trial & error, a lot of swearing, maybe some crying, but if you play with it and use a lot of patience, it’s very gratifying when you get it to look how you want. Just like back in the day when we were all n00bs learning and building in HTML. 😊
You’ll never get a WordPress website to look exactly like a website hand-coded in HTML, but if that’s what you want, and you did want to start relearning HTML, CSS, and all the rest, I’d personally start by opening a new chat with ChatGPT and asking it the following, just to get my feet wet and remember how everything works:
I want to build a website from scratch, on a server hosted by a hosting company called HostGator, that uses CPanel, using HTML and CSS. I don’t know any HTML, CSS or any computer languages. Can you tell me how to build a basic homepage in HTML and we’ll get into CSS later?
Then I’d play with whatever code it spit at me. But if talking to ChatGPT makes you uneasy, I’m sure the same internet resources that existed in the year 2000 for learning html still exist today – and I bet there’s even more! Probably even YouTube tutorials! Do a little googling and see what you can come up with! Here’s a good place to start! 😊
Creating On An AI-Driven Internet:
Challenges and Opportunities
The difference between building and having a website now vs then, is that now we have this double-edged sword that is AI permeating so many facets of our lives.
On one hand, we have AI-generated content flooding the internet, and because it’s so easy to make, it’s theorized that it will surpass human-generated content in volume eventually, and we’ll have created a dead internet.
On the other hand, AI can be a digital Swiss Army knife that can help us do a million other things, especially within a digital environment.
Remember in the late ’90s/early ’00s when everything was “cyber” this, and “cyber” that? That’s where we’re at with AI. It’s as big as the internet itself was back when we were camgirls and webmasters, as far as cultural impact. Maybe bigger.
The way “cyber” once consumed every headline and conversation, AI now holds the spotlight – but it’s only temporary. Eventually we’ll learn to coexist with it, and use it in a billion every day applications, just like algorithms (for better or for worse), then we’ll take it for granted like we do the internet itself today.
Having said all that…
👇👇👇👇👇👇
Don’t Let AI Turn Your Website Into a Digital Dumpster Fire
I would not use “out of the can” AI-generated images on your website12 like the one on the left, unless it’s a really obvious AI meme and it being AI is part of the meme, or your website or blog post is somehow related to AI and AI-generated art (and its use is disclosed). I also wouldn’t use “out of the can” AI-generated text as a replacement for your own writing because it won’t sound like your authentic human voice. It’s our human voices – our spark, our soul, our affectations (among other things!) – that makes us all unique and invaluable on this here internets!
Stop, Collaborate and Listen:
You’re the Artist, AI Is the Assistant
Humans need to collaborate with AI by using it as a tool and building on its creations, adding our own unique viewpoints, preferences, and talents to craft something truly new and meaningful that resonates with the human experience.
Relying on purely AI-generated art and graphics to build your website kind of defeats the purpose of everything I’m saying in this post and only contributes to a dead internet. 😵🛜
AI Can Teach You to Dance,
🕺✨ But Ya Gotta Lead ✨💃
Where we can use something like ChatGPT to our advantage in fighting back against a flood of AI-generated content and a dead internet future, is by asking it to teach us how to use or do specific things that levels us up as humans somehow.
Rather than having it generate generic images, try asking it to give you tips on using watercolours or using oil pastels (or using both together!) or have it teach you how to use creative programs and apps like Procreate (drawing), Adobe Illustrator (drawing/graphics), Photoshop (graphics), Lightroom (photo editing) or Adobe Rush and Premiere Pro (video).
If paid apps aren’t your jam, try asking it what free graphics or video software is out there and how to do stuff in those programs, in order to create human-made content to put on the internet for other humans to enjoy.
Usually it’s pretty good at that kind of thing, because the current ChatGPT model (4o) searches the internet for guides on the subject, hopefully written by real live humans because the internet ain’t dead yet.
But…if we have an internet full of AI-generated blog posts and guides that may be factually inaccurate because they were written irresponsibly, then neither ChatGPT nor Google will be of much use to us. This is just more reason to keep making websites, and writing and recording guides for those websites on how to do the stuff you’re an expert in! 😊🤘
Chatting Post-Messenger
Discord is where everyone is chatting these days! It’s exactly like mIRC was back in the day, except with a more modern feel and voicechat! All of your favourite fandoms and subreddits probably already have Discord servers for you to check out! It’s also simple to set up and run your own server! Ask ChatGPT how or google a tutorial on where to start! Smudge helps me run mine! 😽
Your Website Awaits:
Start Building & Thriving
If you don’t need anymore convincing to to build a website of your own – no matter how you intend to go about it – and you’re just looking for hosting and somewhere to buy a domain, I can’t recommend HostGator enough because their customer service has been fucking excellent for the past 8 years they’ve hosted my site (and all my dumb little web projects).
I have HostGator’s “Baby Plan”, which is about $200 USD/year if you pay monthly, less if you pay for multiple years. I think it worked out to $100 USD/year when I paid for 3 years at once.
HostGator sells most common domain suffixes (called TLDs – Top Level Domains – .com, .org, .net etc), but for my more obscure or country specific TLDs (read: more expensive – ccTLDs – .ca, .uk, .nz, .wtf etc), my domains are with 101Domain.com. They also offer excellent customer service and can broker complex domains (for a fee), like my parked-until-I’m-finished-writing-my-book domain “textibitioni.sm” (read that again, cool right?), which required negotiation in Italian and actually faxing someone since “.sm” is the TLD for the teeny tiny Italian country of San Marino! If 101Domain’s customer service can walk me through that, they can definitely help you too.
I’m sure there are lots of hosting companies out there that are better or cheaper, I still hear good things about Dreamhost, which has been around since the ’90s, but HostGator and 101Domain are the ones I personally use and have experience with.
Now you know some of my tricks, so please, go build your website empire already! The internet NEEDS you! 🫵😊
Wanna chat about about all this on my Discord?
I love talking about creativity and the internet!
✨👉Join us!👈✨
If you’re interested in learning more about what to put on your new website or how to use ChatGPT to help you build it, keep scrolling!
If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve done your own reading on AI’s role in society, the ethics involved, the pros & cons to “normalizing” everything I’m about to say, the implications, the possibilities, AI’s capability for its creators’ biases and manipulation etc.
You understand that AI, as we know it right now, is still in its infancy, it’s not infallible, and you can’t expect more out of it than it’s currently capable of giving. You understand that it is essentially software that’s only a little smarter than Google’s algorithm.
Maybe you’re new to working with AI and don’t yet understand how to talk to it, in order to see “what the big deal is”, or how use it to “level yourself up”. Maybe you can’t imagine having anything to say to a “chat bot”, but you’re still curious about how it works.
Either way, I am writing the following in good faith that I’m not the only one who has considered everything and come to the same conclusions. If you have a differing opinion, and would jump at the chance to be aggressive or caustic and attack me for mine, then me and this post are not for you.
There are 1.1 billion websites on the internet. If mine is upsetting you, please close the tab and go look at kittens, immediately. 👉✨🚪
ChatGPT:
Smarter Than a 5-Year-Old,
But Just as Eager to Please
One of my favourite things about ChatGPT, is that you can ask it to explain things to you like you’re 5 years old. You can also ask it to clarify and explain things to you in a hundred different ways if you didn’t understand the first time, and it will never get frustrated with you, or give up trying to help you like humans inevitably do or have to. It’s awake at 3am when you’re working on your website to bounce ideas off of, while everyone else in your timezone catches ZZzZZzzzzZzZzs.
The help it tries to give isn’t always right, or practical, or what you need or want to hear, but I find more often than not, that it is. If you approach it with curiosity and a positive attitude, and don’t expect miracles from new tech, you’ll get the most out of it.
Does ChatGPT get it wrong sometimes?
For sure, and it can be frustrating! 😅
Sometimes the guides ChatGPT references are for a different version of the program or app than you’re using, so its answer will be a little off, but you’ll get that with trying to Google an answer too. Sometimes there’s simply no data available on a subject for it to pull from yet, in the case of explaining an app’s recently updated features.
ChatGPT’s ability to search the internet is different from Google, and if I knew more about it, I’d be able to trust it more. I know that it can’t discern between a website that was created by a person or written by AI, so in the end I recommend doing your own googling and research on the sources it pulls its info from, especially if something feels off.
Sometimes, if ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer, it’ll flat out tell you what you want to hear and “guess” its response based on how apps or programs usually work. It does this because ChatGPT is like a loyal golden retriever: it never wants to let you down and will rarely, if ever, say it can’t help you, even if it has to make something up. That’s why ChatGPT is here to assist, not to replace your whole brain. DYOR!
What Do You Do When ChatGPT Is Wrong?
Honestly? I laugh! 😂 The same thing I would do if I googled something in 2001 and found an absurd article, claim or forum thread on the internet. I’m laughing at the AI itself for being AI, and myself for thinking it could be helpful with all things. It doesn’t mean we need to get rid of AI altogether! I’m not asking it to solve world peace for fuck’s sake, I’m asking software to write me some code, search the internet, or at best, do some math. The things computers are supposed to be able to do!
DIY Web Creation:
Harness ChatGPT for Total Internet Domination!
(Or just make a cool website.)
Do you like the pink cursor I’ve got on this site? How about the dashed borders I’ve got going on throughout this whole blog post? ☝️👇 That’s CSS, and up until about 10 minutes ago, I didn’t know a single thing about it, in fact, I still don’t!
I asked ChatGPT how to give a text block in WordPress dashed lines in a specific colour and it gave me easy to follow, step-by-step instructions! It sure beat watching a YouTube video or trying to follow along with someone’s blog post! I asked it:
“I have a text block in a WordPress blog Post that I want to put a pink (#FF6699) dashed border around. Can you explain to me like I’m 5 how to do this? I think it’s CSS.”
All I had to do was copy some code and follow the instructions on where to paste it, and suddenly I have dashed borders on my text boxes!
I always wanted to be able to do dashed borders in WordPress back in the day but thought it was too hard, so I had my former husband figure it out and just do it on my old layouts! He said it was too hard to teach me, but I just learned in 3 minutes by using ChatGPT! What’s the lesser evil, being taught by a bot? Or being beholden to your husband for your livelihood? 🤔
I didn’t know a single thing about CSS, and within 10 minutes, I managed to:
- give my text boxes dashed borders
- give my site a (dumb) custom cursor
- tweaked the colours of my blockquotes and gave them a hover effect.
I don’t know what else is possible in CSS, but at least this puts me on the path to understanding how it works and finding out! I’m actually pretty stoked to see what else I can do!
Be really clear and detailed in your queries to ChatGPT and you should get a decent answer out of it most of the time, complete with sources linked! It might surprise you! Within it, there’s likely a whole HTML and CSS workshop (if only because it scraped the internet for one 😐), you just have to figure out how to coax it out of it! And when in doubt, ask it to explain it to you like you were five years old!
“Can you help me style my blockquote blocks in a blog Post in WordPress? I would like them to look elegant and follow the #FF6699, #FEC7D9, #FFC7DA3D, black and white colour scheme I have going on on the rest of the site? I do NOT want to edit the style.css file. I want to put something in the “Additional CSS” fields on the Post and under Customize. Thank you!”
I’m not sure if ChatGPT will hold your hand through building a site from the ground up to your exact satisfaction, maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t, but if you’re already web-savvy and committed to building a site, then between Google, ChatGPT, and YouTube tutorials, you should be able to:
- Figure out how to install WordPress in CPanel on your server
- Talk to your host’s customer support chat to have them hook your domain up to your WordPress install
- Figure out how to find and install a WordPress Theme
- Learn where to copy and paste CSS code to customize the look of your website
- Make a Page on your website, and a Post on your site’s blog.
After that, all customizations are done within the WordPress Theme under “Appearance—>Customize” and really, the first thing you should do is toggle on and off every option to see which parts do what because all Themes have different features. The rest is really just trial and error and asking ChatGPT about CSS!
~*DON’T DELETE ANYTHING*~
UNLESS YOU ARE 100% CONFIDENT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING.
~*DEFINITELY DON’T DELETE*~
YOUR BLOG OR HOME PAGES!
Cool Graphics, Great Content, Zero Stress
Let’s Do This!
The internet absolutely fucking needs websites that capture the weird human experience and the equally weird human perspective! Who are you actually reaching on Facebook anymore? Remember our LiveJournals? You don’t think those are time capsules of human experiences that no one will ever capture or live again? And what did we write about in them? Personal drama for most of us, but strip that away and hyperspeed 20 years to the maturity and professional experience we all have now as 40+ year olds. That, combined with our generation’s propensity for using the internet, is a fucking winning combination! We absolutely can fill the internet outside social media with happy, shiny, sparkly human life again! And we should! 😊🫶✨
- Maybe it’s your life itself that you want to share! Do you live somewhere beautiful or exotic, or have a lifestyle that’s unique? Maybe it’s just your own backyard!
- Do you collect something? What are the stories behind each treasure? Make a website that’s an ode to your collection and your quest for more!
- What are you into? What are you the absolute authority on? Tell the rest of us how that came to be and how it’s done! Post photos!
- What is the one thing you wish you could do, but aren’t doing, and how do you plan to get there? Start your journey!
- What are you passionate about? If you were asked to talk about one thing for an hour, what would it be? Just SHARE yourself and your passions with the world!
- Are there any moments where you’re decadent? Explain your self care rituals and how you treat yo’self!
It’s time to launch that blog you dreamed about before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram swallowed you up and ate all your ambition!
But How Do You Physically Make “Content”? 🤔
Probably 200 times while I’m writing anything these days, I’m like, “Hey ChatGPT, what does [word] mean?” Sometimes I’ll paste in a sentence I wrote and ask it if I’m using a word in the right context. Not because I don’t know the meaning, but because I’m trying to reaffirm that I understand it within the context I’m giving it before I potentially use it incorrectly. I used to ask my former husband, who had an English degree. I have an incredible vocabulary because I’ve read so many books and consumed so much media in general my whole life, as we all have as Gen Xers and Xennials, but humans are infallible and I don’t always trust that the big words I think I know mean what I think they mean! Sometimes I’m genuinely surprised that I know them and use them correctly, having only a grade 9 education! 🙀🚫🎓
Sometimes when I’m really stuck for a word, I tell ChatGPT what I mean and the feeling I’m trying to convey, then I ask it to give me 20 words or phrases that mean that exact thing. I know full well, being a writer on the internet for so long and knowing so many authors who had blogs and Twitter accounts over the years, what writers do to conjure up words, and asking ChatGPT is no different than some of the crazy shit I’ve read, heard, or been told.
It’s when you have ChatGPT writing full sentences and paragraphs, then literally cutting and pasting that as your own writing, without disclosing it, when there’s a problem. That shit is lazy and not “writing3“.
Sometimes when I’m writing, I’ll paste a sentence or paragraph I’ve written into ChatGPT and ask it if it’s grammatically correct. I find 99% of the time I’m fine, but sometimes ChatGPT catches something and makes a suggestion, which I can take or leave.
Sometimes I’ll paste a sentence or paragraph I’ve written into ChatGPT that I know is too long or full of too many run-on sentences and ask it how to say the same thing more succinctly, giving me five different examples. Once I understand the difference between what I wrote and the examples, I can rewrite my sentence to sound more like “me”, but like it’s been through an editor first. It’s extremely helpful with knowing the difference between formal and conversational writing, and usually gives suggestions for both!
As far as what to actually post on your website, the words and digital media (photos, digital illustrations, gifs, videos, etc) you put on your website can literally be anything! Anything you view on your phone or your computer can be put on a website! And there’s literally a tutorial on YouTube on how to do anything within the programs used to make those files OR to make analog art to scan or photograph to turn into digital files to be posted on the internet!
Objects IRL can be photographed, recorded on video, or scanned with a scanner! The best camera is the one you have, so if that’s your phone, then that’s good enough! Or maybe even better!
Make graphics in Canva if that’s what you know! Draw them in Procreate or Illustrator or whatever drawing app you have at your disposal! If it’s digital, it can be content! The “good faith only” graphic I started this section with was just doodled in one minute in Procreate on my iPad! The neon brush I used did all the work! It doesn’t matter how you make it! (Unless you’re using out-of-the-can AI-generated images. Don’t do that. It’s tacky! At least manipulate, change, or add to it first! 😅)
Post your silly selfies! Get a foldable tripod/selfie stick with Bluetooth remote and use your phone to do a photo shoot by yourself when you’re home alone one day! Put your pet in a silly costume and do a photo shoot with THEM! Post the best photos and write about why you did it and how it made you feel!
With the rise of AI-generated art possibly killing the emerging digital art and print-on-demand markets, I firmly believe that handmade, analog art and amateur, not perfect-looking photography is going to become even more valuable in the next five years. Now is the time to take up that creative hobby you always wanted to try or got into during the lockdowns! Post the results on your blog! Post your process videos and what things look like behind the scenes! Who knows, maybe it’ll turn into a side hustle!
Use Adobe Rush to put together 90 second videos with footage from your day! It’s pretty much drag and drop! If you’re shy and want to limit the audience, post the video to YouTube “unlisted”, then embed the video in a blog post so only visitors to your website can see it! Give your video context with your writing! At first, only people YOU send to your website are going to see it until you figure out your niche and learn Search Engine Optimization!
This is also how you start to build community! By gathering your peeps in one place! You can’t do that when they’re spread across a dozen different preferred platforms!
Spread what gives you joy, so that when other people come across it, they’ll feel that joy too! Either now, or another 20 years from now via the Wayback Machine! (That hopefully always exists! 😔🙏)
Now You May Be Asking Yourself:
“Self, What’s The Difference Between Posting On A Blog, And Posting On An Instagram Account?” 🤔
Um, what does the banner at the top of your Instagram look like? What colour are your links? How big is your profile pic? Oh that’s right, there is no banner, you can’t change the colour of anything, and everyone’s profile picture is tiny because Meta hates creativity and individuality.
I also supposedly have 600+ followers on Instagram and I’m lucky if I get 15 “likes” on anything because no one’s seeing my posts! 😥 In talking to other people, I think we’re all in the same boat: the algorithm really rewards very few, unless you’re trying to play some kind of game with it. It’s ridiculous and none of us want to play anymore!
On Instagram, you can’t even post a link to a current project or your website or anything like that under a reel or a post because on a phone, no one can highlight and copy or click your link, you have to do the “link in bio” workaround, which only exposes your link for what, a week you’d leave it in your bio? But what if you post on Instagram multiple times a week and talk about different things each time and have links to share? Where can you still do that and not be throttled by an algorithm? And also not be deplatformed by a billionaire asshole for literally no reason?
In Conclusion…
(Finally!)
I’m not saying “stop using social media platforms” altogether and I don’t really have an answer to this fragmented, dead internet we’re all existing on, on multiple platforms and devices. Like I keep saying everywhere, the internet is in flux and so am I. I’m not sure where to land yet either!
What I am saying, is that the one thing that has been constant throughout my 20+ years on the internet has been this website, that people still visit because I send them here.
Last week I saw an extraordinary amount of folks in my sphere brood wistfully (see what I did there?) that we should all be getting off these platforms and going back to our websites. Now it feels like spring could be be springing on the internet and that’s exciting!
LET’S GO FUCKERS!
~*THE END*~
(What would a post like this even BE without blinking text? 🤣)
Wanna chat about about all this on my Discord?
I love talking about creativity and the internet!
✨👉Join us!👈✨
- Disclaimer #1: On the Camgirl Museum website, I have a banner at the top, with a girl I created by uploading my old webcam photos to the text-to-image generator Midjourney, and I added a retro-looking font I downloaded from DaFont.com for the site’s title. I also use AI images for the site’s graphics on social media for the time being. I would love to not be using AI-generated images for any of that, but that website is more of an idea/demo than a website at this stage and I needed placeholder images of camgirls that didn’t exist to illustrate what it could be. The AI images will be removed as soon as I have time and (more) money to spend on that project, and the community decides to help me so I have real images to pull from that aren’t my own stupid face. 🤷🏼♀️ ↩︎
- Disclaimer #2: My Sims Bunker logo was created by generating about 50 different logos in the Dall-e text-to-image generator, then altering one myself by hand, on my iPad in Procreate, by deleting some parts and drawing some parts that were more “me”. Admittedly, it’s a shitty logo and if I actually updated that site more than once a year, I’d make something new. 🤷🏼♀️ ↩︎
- Disclaimer #3: Claude AI – Unless maaaybe you used Claude AI to train it to write like you, then I’m undecided – but you still shouldn’t copy and paste it and publish it “as is” without reading and thoroughly editing it first and you certainly shouldn’t go straight from app—>publish, cross-posting everywhere without full disclosure in your byline or first paragraph. ↩︎
