Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website!

I suspect that if you’re reading this post then it’s likely that you already have a website but if not, consider making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website. Or maybe your site or blog has been inactive for a bit, think about doing some more posts on there. Even a little thing on Neocities works. It’s just nice to have a home base on the internet that you don’t have to deal with social media mods or randos popping into every post, and if something goes wrong with your host, you just move it elsewhere.

I also just like following personal blogs on bear blog with my RSS feed reader. More people should consider getting back into RSS, where it’s much easier to see posts on your favorite websites instead of expecting it to pass in your feed on social media and frequently missing stuff because you weren’t refreshing Instagram/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever at the right time. I suspect mailing lists are probably also very valuable to game devs trying to promote stuff but I can’t really vouch for that one.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

Anyway, that concludes my regular “Make a website” post. Obviously a lot of bias comes from being a little older and preferring how I probably misremember The Old Internet, but it’s also just nice to push back on the internet becoming smaller and I value communication through comments on posts and emails more than getting likes and retweets.

Forums Are Still Great

Once in a while I’ll see a post on social media lamenting that the Internet isn’t as good as it used to be and pine for certain things like forums, personal sites, IRC, etc but you can still do old internet stuff! There’s still plenty of active forums, and you probably already know this if you’re reading this site, but you can still make websites and webrings. IRC chat rooms are still going too. It’s still fun! Go do it if you miss it that much.

I really like papercult.club for tabletop rpg discussion. It’s a nice smaller community and it feels like there’s very little drama in the indie ttrpg scene when people can actually discuss stuff in smaller communities. This applies to the various ttrpg discords I’m in too.

DOS Game Club is another favorite of mine. It’s a DOS game discussion group where each month they pick a different DOS game to play and discuss. There is an IRC channel built into the web page too if you prefer real time chat and I think it’s a nice place to hang out.

Sometimes I poke my head into the IntFiction.org forums to see what is happening with the interactive fiction community too.

I’m sure I’ve talked on here about making personal sites. Personal sites are fun too and you can get one going pretty quickly with bearblog.dev or neocities.org. Both support RSS feeds as well, which is still neat and very useful.

Anyway, this stuff all still exists and it’s fun!