For roughly a decade, the personal website was a thing we tolerated rather than loved — a static résumé, a portfolio with a contact form, a place that mostly pointed elsewhere. The actual writing, the part with a voice and a point of view, happened on platforms with better distribution and worse manners. That bargain is quietly coming undone, and the reasons are stranger than the usual story about algorithms.
I have been keeping a list. Not a thorough one — just names of people I used to follow on the big networks and now find, instead, at quiet URLs of their own. The list is now long enough that I no longer think it’s an accident.
What changed, exactly
The conventional explanation is some combination of algorithmic decay, platform rot, and the slow realization that renting an audience is a bad deal. All of which is true. But it misses something subtler, which is that the act of writing for an algorithm is itself tiring in a way that writing for a page is not.
A website is a room. A feed is a hallway. You can decorate a room. You cannot decorate a hallway. — overheard, somewhere on Mastodon
The small-tool renaissance
Static site generators are part of it, but they are not the whole story. The whole story is that the tooling — Astro, Eleventy, Hugo, even a well-loved Jekyll — has finally caught up with the idea. You can stand up a site in an afternoon and edit it with a CMS that doesn’t try to own you.
npm create astro@latest my-website
That is, no kidding, the entire installation step. Five years ago this would have required Webpack, three plugins, and an afternoon of yak-shaving.
I am not going to pretend this is a movement. It is closer to a quiet migration — the kind where you notice, one Sunday, that half the people you used to read on the platform are gone, and they did not announce it, and the writing they are doing now is better.