Why Make a Website?

It’s late 2022. I get it. Why make a website?

Like many people, I use social media sort of begrudgingly. For years, I’ve tried to convince myself that I need facebook, for example, because that’s how to stay connected with friends and family, but is it? I’ve also tried to convince myself that it’s a necessary evil when trying to run any sort of public-facing project such as art and business, and I concede that it kind of is. Hard to participate in conversation and commerce if you’re not showing your services or wares to a space where people are paying some amount of attention (that’s really its own, related problem).

At face value, it’s great, right? Everyone has a platform to shout from the rooftops about something they’ve created or accomplished. Everyone can access the “hive mind” for help on something. But the negative aspects can be pretty overwhelming. There are now a wealth of studies warning us about the emptiness, falsehoods, and sense of loneliness brought on or worsened by social media.

It’s late 2022. I get it. I’m not getting into the multitude of reasons why social media sucks. We’re likely going to keep using it for now because we percieve it as more helpful than harmful. For now.

So, lately I’ve been thinking: how can I take a significant step away from what I view as a horrible ratrace for people’s ever-fleeting attention without feeling like I’ve cut myself off from people who are using it? Remember: I’m a musician who promotes my work online!

Make a website.

This isn’t a totally foreign concept for me, actually. I built and ran a number of websites back in the late ’90s/early 00s and had a lot of fun doing it. It was a great way for me to develop some creative skills and a perfect way to spend time between 1:00 and 5:00 AM in my late-teens/early 20s. Now that I think about it, I probably only stopped doing it because of the advent of social media. Why would anyone waste their time on one dude’s personal website when everyone could suddenly sort of have their own – all in one spot?

That’s fair enough. That’s why I intend to keep using social media, but only in a very limited capacity. The idea is to post here on askDNA.coffee, then use coding magic to push little updates to social media, thereby taking that step back, spending less time looking for likes and more time just focusing on ideas.

My hope is to build this site into something that is helpful not just for me, but hopefully for others, as well. And, unlike social media, I own all the content I post here!

What do you think? Have you ever considered taking a step back? Is social media all that bad? Does the world really need another website?