Why everyone should have a website

Part 1 of 3 in Own Your Corner of the Internet. Part 2 shows you how to build your site for about $11 a year. Part 3 connects it to the new social web.

If everything you’ve ever posted lives on Facebook, Instagram or X, you don’t really have a home online. You’re renting. And your landlord can raise the rent, change the locks, or tear the building down whenever it wants.

A website of your own fixes that. It’s the one place on the internet that’s actually yours.

Your stuff lives on someone else’s land

Platforms change the rules all the time, and they don’t ask first.

Facebook is the clearest example. Its links used to send people out to the rest of the web. Then it stopped. By late 2023, Facebook was sending about 80% fewer visitors to news sites than it had three years earlier, according to Similarweb data analyzed by Axios. X fell by about 60%.

Groups got the same treatment. In 2024, Meta shut off the tools that let outside apps post to Facebook Groups, with 90 days’ notice. Organizers who had built their whole workflow around those tools had to start over.

None of this was personal. It’s just how the business works. These companies make money by keeping you scrolling inside their app, so anything that sends you somewhere else is a cost to them.

And it can get worse than a drop in reach. Accounts get locked. Groups get flagged by automated systems. When that happens, there’s usually no one to call, and everything you built goes with it.

Websites are good for the internet

The web was built so anyone could publish a page and anyone could link to it. No permission needed, no algorithm deciding who sees what.

That open web still exists. But it shrinks every time someone posts only inside an app. A lot of what’s on Facebook sits behind a login. And the platform decides who sees it, and who doesn’t.

A website is the opposite. Anyone can read it, link to it, or find it through a search engine. It stays at the same address for as long as you want. Every personal site makes the open web a little bigger and a little harder to take over.

A home base, not a replacement

You don’t have to quit social media. Most of us can’t, and that’s fine.

Post the real thing on your own site first, then share the link everywhere else. People who build their own sites call this POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Your site becomes the original. Social media becomes the megaphone. If one platform goes sideways, you lose a megaphone, not your home. Your writing, your photos and your contact info are still right where you left them, at an address you control.

Why I care about this

I started StarBase 118, a Star Trek roleplaying community, on AOL in 1994. AOL’s chat rooms are long gone. StarBase 118 is still running more than 30 years later, because it moved onto its own website and never handed its home to anyone else.

I see the other side of that story in my work. I help progressive nonprofits run their tech, and I’ve watched a lot of good organizations get cornered by platforms they can’t replace. Their supporters, their history and their reach all live on someone else’s terms.

That’s why I wrote Freehold, a proposal for an internet without landlords. In it, your posts live on your own domain, hosted by whoever you trust, and shared out to whatever networks you choose. If you stop trusting your host, you move, and everything comes with you.

Freehold is a big idea. A personal website is the first, smallest step toward it, and you can take that step this week.

It’s never been easier

Ten years ago, a website meant paying a developer or wrestling with a website builder every month. Not anymore.

With free tools and an AI assistant like Claude, you can build a real website without writing code. The only bill is your web address, about $11 a year. No monthly fees.

Next, Part 2: Build your own website for (almost) free. It’s a step-by-step guide anyone can follow in about an hour.