Sadly that, combined with the changes Google made to deprioritize results from personal sites like these, all but destroyed these neat bespoke pages.
Being able to set your own background, color, font, potentially animated, with auto-playing music of your choice was like letting the average person be a web developer.
It also feels very anti-hacker to me. A core ethos across open source software is that each user should be in charge of how their software behaves, should they choose to be. That includes the lowly "average person" who is not a web developer.
Google, meanwhile, sees that everyone is setting up Facebook profiles instead of websites because it's easier, and now businesses websites are sometimes quite out of date compared to their Facebook pages so they begin prioritizing results from network sites over regular pages. And now people can follow their favorite businesses on Facebook and be at least somewhat assured they'll always know if, for example, they have to close up one day unexpectedly and won't be doing business again until tomorrow.
This is not meant to be an argument against the cheap web, mind: I'm just saying that people trend towards what is the lowest-cost option (by money, time, effort, or any combination) and use it because it works and gets the job done. I still keep a website, because I value my independence and have no interest in having my thoughts dumbed down to suit the preferences of corporate America. But the vast majority of people do not care about that (until they get smacked with a ban-hammer anyway) and will just stick to the easy option.
Also, I would state: there is no reason we couldn't have a social media site that functions as a public utility instead of a for-profit corporation. We could just... have a Facebook that doesn't need to piss everyone off to make money. Social media without profit motive could be a massive boon to our society.
Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s.
OK, a Wordpress site then. Now I'm dealing with introductory rates that shoot up after a year unless I just use a standard VPS and now I'm having to do a lot of stuff myself. And, as far as I can tell, most of the literally thousands of templates/themes out there don't make it straightforward to just have a nice homepage with a simple blog post that doesn't require a high-resolution photograph to go with it.
I'm probably settling on just sticking with Blogger using a new theme. I'm not really happy with that solution--but I'm not a web designer. I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
There's some level of complexity in all of those choices compared to just having a FB page.
I liken it to taking the bus everyday over buying an e-bike. Buying a bike is complicated, expensive, easy to make mistakes. But at the end of the day, you'll have a vehicle to take you from A to B.
You don't have to buy one, as long as the bus keeps running. But one day the bus route or schedule might change, and it no longer takes you where you wanted to go. This is when having a bike, warts and all, would've been be useful.
I mean, there's a floor right? The floor being that you need a server that can respond to HTTP requests, yours or otherwise; you need said server accessible from an address to which you can map a DNS record to; and you need HTML files that can be served in response to that request. Few of these are free, but many can be had for very cheap.
> So I don't want to do a Facebook page. What are my relatively low-cost options?
Amazon S3 with Cloudflare in front of it and a domain name. Probably about $15 per year unless you manage enough traffic to get billed by Amazon.
> Well, I can have a really basic HTML site but that's a little late-90s.
I think that's a little reductive. HTML sites can be just about anything and they can be quite fancy if you're willing to put the time in to learn something like Jekyll. As a side hustle I maintain a couple of basic HTML websites for local businesses, and just bill them for the annuals + the time I spend tweaking things for them, which thanks to my workflows, isn't much.
> OK, a Wordpress site then. .... I'm willing to spend some money but I haven't really found an answer I love.
I mean, that's just the platform-ification of the Internet described. There's a floor of technical requirements and software experience required to publish on the Internet, and the vast majority of people like yourself do not possess it and aren't interested in acquiring it. That's fine, but it's akin to saying "I want to print a newsletter but don't want to learn how printers work." You've selected yourself out of your own goal.
HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript can make dynamic and beautiful websites. But it's not without a learning curve, and if your response to that is "well I want to do this without learning HTML/CSS/JS" well, that's the central conceit of Facebook pages, Shopify websites, and Wordpress.
But, if I'm going to be on Blogger anyway for blogging, my best bet is probably to find a reasonable way to also make it my home page destination. Or maybe not. We'll see. I'm just not sure I'm especially interested in spending a lot of time on tech that isn't my ultimate objective.
Good news is you can still go to mastodon, after all.
I'm gonna need a real big citation on that. If by freedom you mean what a lot of people mean, which is that it opens potential revenue streams and markets and the oppression has it's origins in capital holders, then sure. "Freedom" in it's modern vernacular tends to mean this, hence "bringing freedom to Iraq" actually meaning "making sure Iraq's oil and other assets are open to exploitation by western corporations." By this definition the Internet has never been more "free."
Which is the opposite of "we need an official social network" intervention