Social media platforms can be useful for discovery, conversation, and reaching new people. But ultimately, they are rented spaces - governed by somebody else’s rules, algorithms, business model, and priorities. A personal website is different: it belongs to you, it is the place where your content lives and your story evolves over time. It is where people are able to directly find you and your work without having to navigate someone else’s platform first.
This post is not a rejection of social media per se. It is an argument for putting social media into what I believe is its proper place: as an appetizer or amplifier for work that has a permanent home elsewhere.
What follows is partly an argument for maintaining a personal website, and partly the story of my own online presence, which goes back to 1997. As with much of what I write on this website, this is more of a "stream of consciousness" based on my personal experience, rather than a definitive guide. 😇
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Key advantages of maintaining a personal website or blog
Let's dive right into this. The benefits really are quite obvious:
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You own your content and control the way in which you want to present it.
That's already a key point: you have full control over your story (or "brand", if that's what you prefer to call it) - the visual design, the site structure, the content, the user experience, and the future direction. You are free to choose from a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS) or site builders, and from a myriad of templates suited to almost any purpose. You can have people subscribe to your content in different ways, and thus reach them directly. If needed, you can tweak the capabilities of your site by using turnkey solutions for common customer interactions such as an online store, a paid subscription model, or a calendar for bookings or speaking engagements, to name just a few. - 2.
Your content organically accumulates over time.
No matter if you are a writer, a creative artist, an academic or a technical expert: content on your own site can become a durable, organized archive - one that you control, can back up, export, redesign and preserve over time. Your entire published body of projects, writings and ideas becomes accessible, and your evergreen website content can continue to be found for many years. When someone is considering working with you or purchasing something that you made, they can go to your site and spend as much time as they like exploring your work and understanding who you are - something that no single cover letter or sales pitch could ever accomplish. - 3.
Your own domain name becomes your identity on the internet.
Each piece you publish on your own website can be indexed by search engines and discovered over time1. When people do a web search for your name, for services that you render, or products that you offer, the results show up under your domain name. This helps to establish trust and confidence in being able to contact "the real person", not some impersonator or artificial actor. Also, amidst the almost epidemic spread of AI-generated or regurgitated content, the notion of "who made this, and why?" becomes more important and valuable than ever. Your website helps establish the provenance of your ideas, works of art, writings, original research etc., providing a history, a context, and an identifiable origin. Think of it like this: A long-running website creates a public trail of dated posts that record how your work, creative output and opinions developed over time. In the age of AI, that kind of context is increasingly valuable. - 4.
You are not subject to the ever-changing whims and rules of social media companies.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Substack, LinkedIn and many others seem to conveniently provide everything: distribution, audiences, community, analytics, and different ways of monetization. But it comes at a cost - quite literally, as payment is often needed to unlock better visibility for your content. You are subject to "the algorithm", an opaque system by which the display of your posts is optimized to serve the platform's commercial interest, not your relationship with your community. Also, you may wake up one morning and find that your favorite platform is now owned by a right-wing billionaire nutcase, or accidentally promotes extremist posts, or has decided to use your original content to train their AI models without offering you a way to opt out. And, just to reiterate my first point: By and large, you don't own (nor can you easily "take with you") any content you post on social media - and if a social media platform were to disappear overnight, or ban your account for whatever reason, all your content posted there, your followers and your interactions (not to mention the time you invested to build all of those) are gone for good.
What CMS or publishing platform you choose for your website is really just a means to an end, and will vary based on your technical skill, the features required by you, and your budget. To be clear, having your own website doesn't make you entirely independent of third parties - you'll still need to rely on domain registrars, hosting providers, and potentially a publishing platform. But you retain the freedom to change these services, migrate your content, maintain your own backups, and decide how your online presence evolves over time.
When you have your own website or blog, the role of social media platforms becomes that of amplifiers and discovery channels that point back to something that you actually own. They direct attention towards your work, while your website provides a place where those relationships can develop further, and where people can engage with your content on your own terms.
So, if you don't already have your own website or blog, why not give it a try? You can start lightly, with a short intro page and a few posts about topics that got you thinking recently. Or maybe you are a creative or visual artist looking to share your work? A researcher working on a challenging scientific problem? A consultant looking to support clients with your professional experience? The possibilities are endless.
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None of the above is abstract to me. I have been publishing online one way or another since the late 1990s, iterating through several generations of the web and a couple of different publishing platforms. The technology has evolved and changed dramatically; the value of having a place on the web that is recognizably your own has not.
My personal history of being present on the internet
It was the early summer of 1997. I had just turned 30 years old, my huge noisy home PC was running Windows 95, and my internet connection was via dial-up modem which worked well on some days, but not so much on others.
Typical mid-1990s Windows dial-up popup screen
There was no Google, Wikipedia or YouTube. The first iPhone was 10 years away. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were still a long way from becoming household names. The prevalent search engines - or should I say "web directories" - of the day were called AltaVista, Lycos, Excite and Ask Jeeves (there was also an early incarnation of Yahoo!).
Except within academia or research, there were no mainstream "Social Networks" to speak of. One fun thing though that existed at the time were "Web Rings", which allowed to link topically related websites and pages in a circular structure by putting a common navigation banner on them. I even created and administered one such ring for a few years, for fan sites dedicated to legendary Hollywood actress Katharine Hepburn.
Katharine Hepburn Web Ring Navigation banner (screenshot via Wayback Machine).
It is hard to convey to today's younger, digital-native generations how peaceful, innocent and full of promise the internet felt in its early days. A far cry from today's algorithm-driven, revenue-based and "everything is a paid subscription" environment.
But I digress.
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During said early summer of 1997, I found myself with a little time on my hands, combined with a genuine curiosity for learning HTML. So I started from scratch to code a small personal site centered around my hobbies and interests. Over the next few years, its content evolved into
travelogues (with photos) of my trips to different parts of the U.S. and Canada,
fan pages about my favorite classic movies,
some information about myself and my hometown of Graz, Austria,
and, like many sites used to have at the time, a guestbook for visitors.
Screenshot of my first website (via Wayback Machine).
Photography wasn't really a major focus yet. That gradually changed from 2004 to 2009, when I was a member of TrekEarth, an online community of photography enthusiasts. Under the motto of "Learning about the world through photography", TrekEarth allowed to post your own photos, comment and critique other members' submissions, and post "workshops", i.e. suggested improvements or creative edits on someone else's photos.
My experience with TrekEarth, along with the large number of photographs I took during the 2000s, gave me the confidence to register my own domain name, and start building my first dedicated photography website in 2009 using WordPress. Until early 2025, I went through many iterations of my site, and a variety of WordPress themes. While I was ultimately able to simplify the layout of the site to my liking, over time I had grown increasingly exasperated at the high maintenance effort just to keep the site and its plugins updated. So in 2025, I ditched WordPress and re-launched my website on Kirby CMS - only to find out that I was still primarily a website administrator, rather than just a photographer and blogger with a website (as I aspired to be).
I previously wrote about this in more detail in the post linked below:
I Moved My Website to Leaflet
I'm leaving behind Content Management Systems for good, in order to focus on creating and publishing photography content on the ATmosphere.
The move to - a social publishing solution based on the AT protocol - in July 2026 finally gave me the freedom and flexibility that I had been longing for. Instead of losing precious time tending to technical updates and site admin work, I now have a lightweight blogging solution that allows me to quickly create and publish content, as well as share a link to it on Bluesky with a single click.
Leaflet is not the point of this story, and neither were WordPress, Kirby, or the hand-coded HTML site that came before them. The point is that, for almost three decades, I have had a place on the internet where I could collect and present the things that mattered to me.
The tools and technology will continue to change. Platforms will rise, decline, become enshittified2, or vanish for good. But having a domain and a site that you can shape around your own work and creative output remains one of the simplest and most worthwhile things you can do online.
Thanks a lot for reading - I wish you good luck, much success, and most importantly a lot of fun with your own personal website or blog!
Screenshot of my current, Leaflet-based website.