Here's an uncomfortable thought: The modern day personal website is someone's tiktok profile page. And it's thanks to the fact that everyone has a phone, and tiktok just works.
There's an opportunity to learn from this model, though I'm not sure what the lesson is.
People could change their own brakes and oil too. But how many folks want to? Not many. It doesn’t provide value to them. Just like a personal website wouldn’t provide value to them. Hence, like you said, social media pages are their “personal website”.
It’s also a practical reality of living in a complex world. Someone using Excel isn’t thinking about how that app was programmed. Most computer programmers don’t have in-depth knowledge of how a CPU works. And they definitely don’t understand the chemistry of a transistor.
The fact is we live in a world too complex to understand it all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Most of the cool things about personal sites can be replicated without the needless toil of actually messing with hosting yourself.
Even Markdown isn't enough.
I want a site where we can view posts on a calendar, write things in full BBCode, view by tags or heirarchy (Or a hybrid, like #stories.romance), clone your stuff as a git repo and edit locally, etc.
Whereby ;
And this was prior to Cloud BTW (and I met with some goog eng friends in 2006 or so about it, but they said it would never be a thing:
I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone, which you would dock, and then grab an instance of your desktop from the cloud... (a while later motorola tried to launch such a device...)
Anyway, here is my current take:
Every phone should be able to have a way to manage your own APIs such that your links to whatever media buckets you have/sub to - you can very easily just create little widgets that will pull your IGs, HNs, whatever and you can just slide the content-boxes around and organize a page very easily...
Add a content-box (we attempted to build a site around this idea in ~2005 - no bueno - as mobile didnt exist as it does today)
the content box will be [text, pics, audio, links, etc] and you can nest one on top of the other...
So add an element - then drop it on top of another to have the link (think tooltip hover to whatever child box on parent)
etc...
Cloudflare the F out of it - and allow for black/whitelists of content within the profile of the user (never link to FB or Twixxxter, whatever)
You get the gist.;
Sun used to have a desktop product similar to this, it worked with an authentication token like a company badge or whatever. You could go sit at any desk and login and you'd have your own desktop environment including audio.
Of course the whole thing was proprietary and it was server side so you needed heavy servers. Also logging in remotely wasn't possible IIRC cause it required a huge network pipe (aka on-premises). It died a quiet death.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
As someone who was just in the hospital for nine weeks in an area where the cell towers didn’t seem to provide anything higher than 3mbit in downtown St Louis with a >2 second lag time, I can verify that at least some Americans in my corner of the world live in places where broadband is just not a thing. And most of America is rural America.
I retweeted it at the time, but annoyingly it looks like twitter doesn't have a way to search for retweets older than 7 days. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anat...
Here's some stats showing that some ~27M households (almost a quarter) don't have home internet at all, and presumably just use their phones: https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-househo...
Frustratingly, I can find the wolfram alpha statistics I was calculating at the time, but not the article itself that I got them from. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+b...
EDIT: Aha, 162.8 million was the magic number that started turning some some search results. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide....
The study was from 2018, so I wonder how it's changed in the past five years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
> Among all households in 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer and 85% had a broadband internet subscription.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...
> And most of America is rural America
What?
> Despite the increase in the urban population, urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population, down from 80.7% in 2010.
> https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
As for those who just use their phones at home, if their phones do get above broadband speeds, would that not classify them as having home broadband?