Modern Personal Sites

Why have a personal fansite in a post-social media world? A question I’ve asked myself often.

The truth is that the digital landscape has changed a lot since we started making fansites back in the day. Back in the day, a fansite could get a lot of attention for having accurate information. Nowadays, accurate information is not spread across fansites but located on one major wiki per fandom. The info may come from dumping the game, whereas fans would have to guess what was going on using their own copies of the game. Walkthroughs still exist, but fansites rarely hosted them in the first place. Many people use video walkthroughs anyway, as descriptions given by text walkthroughs about where to go are often difficult to parse. Artists and writers nowadays get more attention by sharing their art on social media or hosting it on a centralized space like archive of our own.

While those nostalgic for the personal web may wish to go back to a time when none of these things were true, we need to accept that it’s not 2003 anymore. Moreover, some of these changes are positive - I’m glad there are centralized repositories for game info instead of having to trawl through a bunch of sites of questionable quality. If we want to make personal sites, we need to adapt to the modern era and ask ourselves - what can personal sites offer today that cannot be offered on other platforms?

I’d say a combination of the following: personalization + organization.

One of the noticeable issues of social media is that both of these are lacking. That’s not to say you can’t express your personality or organize your content on sites like tumblr, youtube, twitter, etc. It’s more to say that these sites really are not meant for that, and purposefully try to make content as modular and streamlined as possible. Tumblr is probably the last major social media site that allows you to customize your page using html, and most new users do not take advantage of this. Social media sites want to optimize everything for phones, so no cool layout for you! Social media sites also want you to see new content over old content, or even better, new algorithmically delivered content. If you liked an old post, good luck finding it again unless the creator is really good about tagging their stuff!

Creators try to fight against these constraints. Some people really go the extra mile on making YouTube playlists that organize all their content, or tagging things on tumblr. But they are fighting an uphill battle. You will forget to tag something, or tag it wrong, or fall behind and give up altogether. These sites don’t care about you making your own custom space. They want you to create and consume interchangeable content on interchangeable screens.

The personal web gives you total control over how your content is presented. How many columns do you want in your layout? Maybe you want to just dump every link on one page and then a back button. Or maybe you want a three-column layout organized by topic. Maybe you want different layouts for different pages. All this is possible on your personal site. Moreover, it’s not difficult! Or maybe I’ll say - it’s as difficult as you want it to be. You decide if you want something simple or complicated. What matters is this - it belongs to you.

What about content? I would say that merely collecting information about something is probably not enough to make your site stand out anymore, but I will add a caveat - presenting factual information in a useful or convenient way is very useful. Just because something is found on a wiki doesn’t mean it’s presented in a way that’s useful for readers. Depending on your programming skills, you may even come up with an interactive tool for accessing or comparing data. That’s very useful!

Otherwise, think about the type of content people make for other sites. Most video essays on YouTube could easily be a webpage. Or character analysis posts on Tumblr. Essentially, stuff explaining your personal theories, opinions, or organization of things. This has always been a popular use for fansites!

I also want to point out that it’s not one or other - social media or fansite. You can… use social media to promote your fansite. In some ways, you get the best of both worlds with this. Quick feedback and attention, on sites you control. You need to watch out for the social media that you use, of course. Twitter/X punishes you for trying to promote your site nowadays, so that is no longer a useful way to promote.

One of the key things about fansites is that they are slow. The whole culture was much slower back then. You have probably become accustomed to quick, snappy feedback on anything you post, with notifications every time someone likes what you make. Maybe you expect daily or weekly updates. You shouldn’t hold yourself to this standard as someone updating a fansite. This is a great way to burn out!