#Reflections On An Ever Shifting Internet 2026-06-18T09:32:00.000Z When I first starting blogging on tumblr way back in (I think?) 2011, every blog was still deeply personal and highly customized to each individual's unique tastes across the board. It was a social media site, but I still feel like it attempted to follow in the footsteps of and build upon its predecessors, MySpace and the very personal websites of the old web. These custom crafted tumblr blog layouts still exist now, but people mostly experience the site through mobile dashboard rather than desktop blogs, and the website itself has long since become nigh akin to a ghost town as people by and large choose to subject themselves to even more miserable platforms. Many blogs even forego all but the default altogether now. The pages of a facebook, twitter, or instagram user are corporate and lifeless on their own. There is little to offer in the way of customization, except for what pops of color you can add with your posts. No matter how I clawed at the black and white minimalistic grids I couldn't ever make it to my liking. No matter how much of my art I posted I could never fully make my profiles feel like my own. Imagine if you truly enjoyed pushing your creativity with scrapbooking and collages, and then someone hands you a carefully pre-laid-out "live laugh love" planner. The feeds of these website are made to drive engagement, and consume content faster faster and faster. It is built to discourage stopping to take your time to appreciate the grand fanart illustration that took its creator over 24 hours of painstaking detail work to craft. It certainly discourages going to that artists profile and seeing any part of them that isn't just another quick scrap of consumable content, what if you spend too much time tneir and don't consume more other content? If you play the algorithm right the numbers of how many people have seen and liked it go up, but is more numbers really the same thing as engagement? Did your beautiful illustration get anyone to really think or feel anything, did it spark a conversation, did you make new friends over it, is it part of a community? Probably not, because these platforms are actively built against these functions. People still manage to do these things there, sometimes, but trying is like pulling teeth as social media is largely structured against being truly social. I think social media uses people now, not the other way around. To be honest they always did, they are businesses after all, but now it feels so viscerally tangible and at the forefront that even whatever addictiveness the purposefully enscribe into it cannot even grasp my supposedly addiction-prone and attention deficient brain, lol. I started my own site because social media has been enshittified to the point where I can no longer really construct my own virtual playground on any of them. Even tumblr, not my earliest experience with the internet but certainly my first experience with blogging, recording my interests, hoarding artwork and aesthetic images that inspired me, and sharing my own art, never quite enabled me to be the architect of my own virtual home. It's something I can always come back to whenever, even if I've dropped it for a long time, and not feel so overwhelmed that I need it nuke it and start over. My little winding and meandering unplace between places that exists quietly in the walls of a beautiful yet deafening internet. I hope anyone who also wanders through here finds something that makes them happy, too.