Like Aftermath, Greg Pak advocates for having a web presence not owned by an oligarch:

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen Meta push anti-LGBQT “moderation” policies and TikTok shut down after being banned by the US government — further confirmation that no social media site will last forever and anyone who needs to reach folks via the internet should build their own independent presence and contacts.

Greg is a comics artist, but also has wise words on politics (and is a cool photographer to boot). I started following him on Mastodon, and have also started following his blog and newsletter. As he and his friend and fellow author Preeti Chhibber discovered, building a website yourself is just plain fun.

My friend Preeti Chhibber got me and a bunch of other writers hooked on neocities when she used it to create a brilliantly awful 1990s retro geocities-style site to promote her new book. I made my own retro 1990s site using actual old graphics and design from my actual 1999 website — and ended up falling in love all over again with those simple, effective design techniques.

Preeti's website looked cool but unfortunately doesn't render well on mobile browsers, and that's okay. The modern web is all about high availability and perfect rendering. Maybe some sharp edges are good, actually.

glitch.com is another good way to fiddle with some code and see what you can make, the more retro the better. Just try it! What's the worst that can happen?