Last week I wrote about needing to make space for myself again, and thank you to those who read it and encouraged me to return. I've been trying to figure out what kind of space I’m actually building and it has led me to reflect on the Internet I used to know and the one that I want to see.

Back in 1994, Justin Hall started what many consider the first blog, raw, unfiltered, and gloriously weird. My fellow senior millennials would also remember screeching dial-ups, unapologetic Geocities sites and the rise of OG bloggers like Kottke and Swiss Miss. These weren't "content creators", just people with thoughts and the generosity to share them with the world.

Then came the platforms that promised to make everything more "social." Instead of building personal websites, we busied ourselves with crafting personal profiles on apps. The weird little digital homes made way for public squares and walled gardens, and the thriving internet ecosystem became a monoculture: fragile and extractive. Cory Doctorow coined a term for what happens next: enshittification, the inevitable decay where platforms start good for users, then abuse users to court businesses, then abuse everyone to maximize profit before collapse.

Today, many of us are clicking on fewer links to visit websites, relying instead on AI-assisted summaries (although Google would deny this). We get machines to suggest things for us to read, listen, and watch. The mainstream internet experience can at times feel like a bland soup of AI-generated summaries and algorithmically optimized content. But maybe it's not all like that.

I'm just a regular person who's been online since the last century. But from where I'm sitting, there's a quiet rebellion happening. People are returning to personal websites, RSS feeds, blogrolls, and long-form writing.

Matthias Ott declared 2024 "The Year of the Personal Website." I also recently learned that Neocities, a spiritual successor to Geocities, now hosts over 1.3 million websites in 2025! It may be a drop compared to Instagram's bazillion users, but it's exactly what Erin Kissane terms the "small internet." Opt-in over algorithmic. Imperfect but human.

The small internet holds space for esoteric interests and projects that serve no purpose except curiosity and joy. Like The Useless Web, which its creator describes as "a hub for all things quirky and weird on the internet." Click its button and you're transported to a random useless but delightful website that exists purely for the pleasure of existing. Or if you want something specific, the independent search engine Kagi has a setting to search the "small web."

But the small internet isn't just about whimsy. Visiting Craig Mod's personal website is like stumbling into a well-crafted curious micro-studio of a man taking long walks across Japan and writing newsletters about these meandering adventures and the coffee shops he visits along the way. And then there's Maggie Appleton, who pioneered the "digital garden" concept, where notes are explicitly imperfect and grow over time. She's even made peace with the fact that her site is perpetually unfinished, because that's how actual thinking works.

Many of these personal websites are just people with access to the internet, experimenting with ideas, publishing weird projects, and seeing what resonates. It's all a little bit selfish really, and as Om Malik describes it, "You do it because it is what you want to do for you." Dave Winer writes in The Guardian that the blogosphere is in full bloom while the rest of the internet wilts, and it's all because of personal website owners rewilding their own corner of the internet, one post at a time. This is the internet I want to be part of. The weird, human-scale, perpetually unfinished version.

So I plan to make this website part of my own creative practice, like a micro-studio of sorts. A place where I write about whatever feels right, accepting that some posts will sit unread for years until they find their reader. There'll be room for weird projects that would never belong elsewhere. It will be a home for the miscellaneous etceteras and the untitled xyzs. And that's why it's named etcxyz.net.

Last week's post was the seed, and by registering the domain name and cobbling together this site, I've taken the first steps in claiming my little corner of the internet. Armed with a laptop and the internet, I'll get my hands dirty and start building. Things will break and get weird for sure, but feel free to drop by if you like. Fair warning though: I'm still unsure if what I have here is barren or fertile land.