The first thing is to accept, difficult as it may be, that that era of the net is gone and can't come back. I say this as someone who desperately wants that not to be true, but it is.
The number 1 reason for that is that the internet is everywhere now, whereas it wasn't before. That's why it was magic. Stumbling through Geocities sites and AOL chatrooms, it was always possible to find bits of arcane knowledge posted by a human who was educated and tech-savvy enough to even be online long enough to author something on it.
That's not the case now. Most of the arcane knowledge has been on Wikipedia or similar sites, or hoovered up by some chatbot that spits it back out to you in the most listless writing voice possible. Moreover, you consume thousands more pieces of content daily than you did back then. If you came across something special, how long would it be before you abandoned it out of boredom and desire for a dopamine hit from somewhere else?
Everybody is online now too, so forget about finding charming little outposts online; the best modernity offers is an occasionally funny social media account from a person who is almost certainly trying to sell a book, or course, or these days, a paid Discord channel. They create content for the sake of showing up on people's feeds, and that gets formulaic and performative real fast.
So, making the types of personal websites people used to want to browse through, is largely pointless for somebody not in the tech/media industry. There are a thousand better ways to communicate info to others.
The number 1 reason for that is that the internet is everywhere now, whereas it wasn't before. That's why it was magic. Stumbling through Geocities sites and AOL chatrooms, it was always possible to find bits of arcane knowledge posted by a human who was educated and tech-savvy enough to even be online long enough to author something on it.
That's not the case now. Most of the arcane knowledge has been on Wikipedia or similar sites, or hoovered up by some chatbot that spits it back out to you in the most listless writing voice possible. Moreover, you consume thousands more pieces of content daily than you did back then. If you came across something special, how long would it be before you abandoned it out of boredom and desire for a dopamine hit from somewhere else?
Everybody is online now too, so forget about finding charming little outposts online; the best modernity offers is an occasionally funny social media account from a person who is almost certainly trying to sell a book, or course, or these days, a paid Discord channel. They create content for the sake of showing up on people's feeds, and that gets formulaic and performative real fast.
So, making the types of personal websites people used to want to browse through, is largely pointless for somebody not in the tech/media industry. There are a thousand better ways to communicate info to others.