starting to think that leaving Big Tech sites is very cool and fine, actually
Today, I made a three-page website on Neocities. The first page is an introduction and index to the other two pages. The other two are my resume and portfolio, respectively.
(I won't link them here because I very much enjoy my small-Web pseudonymity. If you want to hire a copywriter with way too much experience, though, there's always my email.)
I also did some FAQ-reading and migrated the domain name I've had for 15 years off Wordpress and onto the new Neocities site. Now anyone who looks me up under myactualname dot thatwebsite will see the new one, not the Big Shiny Professional Blog I wrote for 15 years.
I'm planning to delete the Big Shiny Blog and my LinkedIn account. Probably this week.
The part of me that worked for the commercial Web for years has some anxiety about the mere thought. Some 13 percent of the world's adults are on LinkedIn, according to this post by Jon Sterling, and commercial web brain is terrified to not be among them. The networking! The contacts! How will people know you exist if you aren't on LinkedIn? DO you exist if you're not on LinkedIn??
...Yes. Because the facts indicate I don't need LinkedIn and never did.
Like Jon Sterling, I was an early adopter of LinkedIn. And in all the time I've had a profile there, I have not made one meaningful business contact or landed a single client, account, or piece of paying work from LinkedIn. Ever.
How valuable can it be, really?
Wordpress was an easier sell to delete for me. I've used it for years, but I've actually never liked it. It's never given me the kind of control I want; I only stayed because I built an early following, back in 2009 or so, and I wanted to keep it. But my subscriber numbers haven't changed in years, and the switch to block editing makes Wordpress even less a thing I want to keep using.
The only reason it took me so long is that I didn't want to lose my domain name. I've had it for over 15 years. I bought it and continually renewed it through Wordpress, and I wasn't sure whether I could leave while maintaining it.
So I did some reading. (Do recommend: the giant resource list at 32bit.cafe.) And now my domain name is free of Wordpress. Took less than an hour.
The most liberating, and perhaps the most dangerous, thing the Web is teaching me is that I can in fact do a lot of things myself. I can write my own website. I can buy a domain name and point it wherever I want it to go. I can communicate with people without needing the world's giant data-scraping sites to do it.
It's liberating because it frees me to do and say what I actually think, rather than creating a sanitized version that some social media giant will accept, or that my family/friends/clients all want to see, or that doesn't get me 50 angry strangers telling me to delete my account.
It's dangerous because it's teaching me that I can do those things, which is going to lead to me thinking I should have some kind of right to do those things, which is Extremely Inconvenient to power.
Good.