re: running a personal website is not fun anymore

I recently came across a text by Winnie Lim that left me feeling genuinely saddened. And because of that, I decided to share a few thoughts about it. But before anything else, I think I need to tell you who Winnie Lim is, including for my own sake.

Although she says she has no hobbies because she seems to https://winnielim.org/journal/my-mind-the-invisible-loudspeaker/, Winnie does many things that, in her own words, enrich her as a person, including reading, exercising, and photography. Through her website, which is a blend of journal, blog, and digital garden, she tries to publish something at least once a week, most often documenting her life and her ongoing efforts regarding health and existence.

A few years ago, when my own website had been dormant and I had not yet embraced the idea of turning it into a digital garden, I stumbled upon Winnie's site and thought, "wow, this is the kind of website I'd like to have when I grow up." It was admiration at first sight, and I tried to imitate what she was doing, though unsuccessfully, because as one learns in the indie web, every site has its own personality, its own identity, defined by the person who owns it. The inspiration remained, however, and now, years later, I think I've found my own identity, which is what you see and read here.

Meanwhile, I keep following Winnie and reading her posts, which are wonderful. Then, during Brazil's Independence Day holiday, on September 6th, Winnie published a text saying that maintaining a personal website was no longer fun. And I thought, "what do you mean?" So I read it. And I agreed. And I felt sad.

That led me to want to comment on a few things:

Over the decades I’ve migrated my blogging to other hosted platforms like livejournal, vox, posterous, wordpress.com, medium, etc but in 2015 I decided I want to stop experimenting with other platforms in order to have a forever home with my writing. I started to feel the importance of permalinks – how disruptive and saddening it is when cherished posts by other people go 404.

When I read this excerpt, I thought about two different things. First, how similarly Winnie and I think. When I sought my own address on the internet, it was precisely because I wanted to settle down somewhere, to find a permanent home for my writing and my thoughts, in a way that would allow me to revisit them whenever I wished, while also making them available for anyone who might stop by.

Which brings me to the second thought: I agree completely with Winnie, because there's nothing worse than reading someone's work online and suddenly experiencing a disruption, a break in the experience, when you decide to visit a link they've shared only to discover that a link is broken. Every text on the internet is subject to getting rot, and I have tried to, here at my own site, contribute to avoid that this happens (link in Portuguese) with the links I reference.

Back then I was pro-technology and didn’t fully understand my privilege in many ways. I was always advocating for personal websites without realising how much work it is for the average person.

I don't think I've ever reflected as deeply as Winnie has on the privilege of having technical knowledge. As someone who studied data processing in technical school and later earned a degree in Computer Science, it would be easy for me to assume that building a personal website is simple and, even worse, that anyone can do it. But I don't fall into that trap, because it isn't easy and, depending on someone's background, it can actually be frustrating. First you have to find decent hosting, then learn or relearn CSS, FTP, databases, and a long list of technical details.

It's not for everyone. And even for people who work in technology, it can become tiresome over time. We won't be the same person tomorrow that we are today, just as we're not the same people today that we were yesterday. Human beings are dynamic. Our interests and experiences change, mature, and evolve. And from that perspective, having and maintaining a personal website is a challenge all by itself.

It was then peaceful for a while. But running wordpress on its own is also stressful, people are always seeking to exploit its vulnerabilities.

And that's precisely why, because I agree with her completely, I no longer use WordPress. I moved to a custom solution.

But whether it's a custom solution or not, the underlying principle is the same as the one that leads people to publish their writing on third-party platforms such as Medium, Bear Blog, or, if they want to remain within the ecosystem, WordPress.com. Doing so allows them to focus on writing instead of managing the backend, the technical hassle.

In Winnie's case, she explains that people questioned why she didn't simply use an SSG, a static site generator such as Hugo or Jekyll. But she's unequivocal on this point: the features she wanted, particularly the ability to show connections between her writings, led her to choose WordPress and deal with it as best as she could.

This site is over 10 years old and this is the first time attacks are happening consecutively. Why? AI, obviously. I feel dirty even typing the word out. It is being used to find vulnerabilities at a speed and depth that didn’t occur before.

So I patched the site again, and the next thing I know is that bots are clogging up matomo, which I use to view referral traffic etc. I’ve used robots.txt and .htaccess to block them but most of them are masquerading as humans. I look at the site’s access logs and it is just bots, bots, bots everywhere.

Winnie talks about how her website has been online for more than ten years and how it was recently hacked, twice through WordPress and once through Matomo, the analytics platform she uses to understand where her visitors come from. And who's to blame? Artificial intelligence. Being used to find vulnerabilities at a speed and depth never seen before. When she looks at her logs, all she sees are AI bots, it is just bots, bots, bots everywhere, disguising themselves as real people while taking the opportunity to copy her data, her writing, her creations. And she feels, quite understandably, violated.

I’m spiritually exhausted with these bots. If I’m having so much frustration as a former technically-inclined person, I can’t imagine the average person trying to run a self-hosted personal website. Sadly platforms are the way to go for the average person.

Shortly after saying she feels violated by these AI-driven attacks, this passage about being "spiritually exhausted" made me think about how dealing with AI, which nowadays effectively harasses our data and creations, can indeed be frustrating. If someone with a technical background grows tired of dealing with the jargon and complexities of running a personal website, what about someone without that foundation? That's why I have to agree that, for most people, hiding behind the walls of large platforms seems like the safest solution, even if that won't protect them from the platform's own artificial intelligences.

I’ve personally argued that we are probably living in the dark times but dark times are only obvious when viewed with the lens of history.

There is no shortage of news about artificial intelligence these days. The subject isn't going away anytime soon, and concerns continue to grow regarding control, fair use, and mitigation measures to prevent a superintelligence from one day dominating us and ending humanity. But before we even get that far, the discussion also needs to account for problems like the ones Winnie has been facing. Especially because all of us who maintain independent websites, all of us who belong to the small web, are going through the same thing.

I genuinely believe that the cry Winnie let out was a cry on behalf of all of us. And yes, these are dark times. And the trend is for things to get exponentially worse.

I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience.

A small observation here: behind my desire to establish a home on the internet, and a home of my own, is the desire for freedom. The freedom to share what I want, with whom I want, in whatever format I want. I cannot accept, nor agree, that because large companies want to scrape my content in the name of speed, utility, and power, I should simply have to put up with it.

Why should I take the time and effort – the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words – when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.

And this comment from Winnie, near the end of the piece, is where she is most undeniably right: what's the point? What is the value of taking the time to focus, to translate your lived experiences, to weave together your knowledge, to create a conscious flow of words, only for an AI bot to come along and copy it all, and later use it to answer someone else's prompt in a fraction of a second?

What happens to the energy she invested? What happens to the energy all of us invest in maintaining our places on the personal web?

It's a profound question, and one that genuinely saddened me, because sometimes thinking about it leads to the conclusion that there is no way out, no real protection. It feels like trying to stop the tide with your hands, or endlessly rolling Sisyphus's boulder uphill.

I'd like to finish by speaking directly to Winnie: asking her to stay strong, because all of us need to keep trying to stay strong. Asking her to keep going, because the things she writes are excellent, inspiring, and for me, on more than one occasion, they were the difference between a bad day and a good one.

I wish she knew that.

And that I'm right there with her, thinking along the same lines.

#english #highlights #personal-web #writing #artificial-intelligence