Almost everything I write online has an expiry date. A post on a social feed gets its attention in the first few hours, and after that it is effectively gone. It still exists, in the sense that a letter at the bottom of a river still exists. Nobody is going to find it.

That is fine for most things. A joke does not need an archive. But some of what we think about deserves a longer life, and I have started to feel that handing all of it to a feed is a strange way to treat your own thinking.

A feed rents you an audience

The bargain with a platform is simple. You bring the writing, and it brings the readers. In exchange, it decides who sees what, how it looks, how long it stays visible, and whether the rules are the same next year. The audience was never really yours. You were renting it.

A website is the opposite bargain, and on paper it is a worse one. Nobody arrives by accident. There is no algorithm working on your behalf. If you write something good, the world will not necessarily notice.

What you get in return is a place that does exactly what you tell it to. The address stays the same. The page you link to today is the page someone will find in five years. The structure can follow how you actually think rather than how a timeline works.

A place to return to

This is the part that surprised me most. I thought a website would be for other people, and it turns out I am one of its main readers.

When a thought lives somewhere I can find it, I can come back and disagree with it. A note about a book connects to a review, which connects to a project, which connects to a place I went. Those connections are the reason I built this site with separate rooms for writing, reviews, travel and books. None of them is finished. They are meant to be walked through again.

A feed asks what you have to say today. A website asks what you still think is worth keeping.

Writing differently when nobody is scoring it

There are no likes on this page. I did that deliberately, and it changes how writing feels. Without a number waiting at the end, the only useful questions left are whether the thing is true and whether it is clear.

That makes me slower, and I think the slowness is doing real work. Most of what I have got wrong in public, I got wrong quickly.

It does not need to be big

You do not need a large audience for a personal website to be worth having. You need a small number of things you would be glad to still have in ten years. A few essays, a list of books, the projects you made, the places that stayed with you.

So this is my corner. It will change, and some of it will turn out to be wrong. But it will still be here, at the same address, whenever I want to come back to it. That is more than a feed has ever promised me.

Photo: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0.