1. For non technical users (and there are lots of them) learning enough HTML and figuring out how to put it somewhere accessible is too high of a bar to overcome (forget about updating it ever). It's quicker and easier to just establish a presence on some social media site.

2. For technical users who are capable of setting up a website, it's easier to just go where people already are (i.e. social media).

3. It's anecdotal, but I rarely see anyone browsing the web these days. Most web usage seems to consist of endlessly scrolling through Facebook looking for something to interact with. A link to somewhere else might get clicked on, but the user always goes back to the newsfeed once they're done looking at the link.

Most people don't have personal websites because getting an audience of users to a personal website is like asking a mountain to come to you.

Another proverb is: "Meet people where they are at"

There are exceptions to these proverbs but they require exceptional people or exceptional circumstances. The vast majority of people are not trying to be exceptional with respect to the kinds of things they would put on their personal websites. Very few individuals are willing to put the effort into "moving mountains" to build an audience on their own website.

1) search name

2) install app

3) open app

4) tap through sign-up. Maybe type your name or other familiar details.

5) Nothing to do here because it already imported all your contacts, if relevant.

6) Post/message. You did this all from your phone. It was free. Everyone you care about automatically knows you’re there and how to reach you in the app. Tap camera icon to post pictures or video.

If you have trouble with any of it, ask literally anyone for help.

Personal website:

1) ???????

Isn't it obvious? It's simply easier to use a social media platform that makes it easy to publish without having to know how to set up a server or mess with frameworks or code, and that makes it more likely that people will read what you have to say. The utility of personal websites has been replaced by services which solve both the problems of ease of publishing and ease of discovery and networking.

I think there's currently a discoverability problem. I love small websites, blogs, passion projects etc and they give me 1000x more joy than social media posts. But I still don't really know a good way to discover them.

Hacker news is honestly probably the way that I find most small web stuff, I like kagi's "small internet" filter a lot too. But as a whole, the likes of google etc are really geared up towards funneling me into looking at posts in social media sites rather than anything else.

The bigger question for me is, if it was dead simple and all they had to do was -say- pay $10/mo, would most people actually choose to have a personal website?

I think the issue comes down to most people not seeing enough value to have a personal site to pay for it. And if they don't want to pay, the free DIY options are either a site like Medium or the technical hurdles they have to jump through to get it up and running manually

Because it's still nearly impossible for a non-tech person to create one. Facebook/Tiktok/Instagram offer a lot of what people would want from a personal website for free and give you connections to your friends/family/strangers

The answer from my experience is simple: because most people that I meet are not programmers (at least not in a strict sense), and don't know many programmers.

On the other hand: most programmers and many STEM degree holders that I meet do have their own websites.

I think that valuable follow-up question would be "Should they have one?"

Roughly in order: Blogging (as a concept), assholes, Google, social media.

I think the first real hit to personal websites was just the concept of blogging. Before blogging was a popular concept there was rarely an expectation someone's website would see constant updates. Just because they shared pictures from their vacation to Spain there was no assumption you found someone's travelogue that would see constant updates. You could "finish" a personal website.

There were of course plenty of sites that would see regular updates but they were free to set that expectation themselves. There's a conceit to blogging that it's something a person just keeps doing. A blog can never be considered complete. All of the organization is temporal and most of the time so is the navigation. If we find a blog that hasn't had updates in some time we've been conditioned to assume it's dead.

A follow on effect to blogging as a concept was the change in web page authoring software. It went from being designed to build a finite website to build continuous stream that is a blog. Organization of sites went from trees to lists. Tags and categories in most blogging software are just filters for temporally sorted lists of posts.

Because the conceit of blogging is constant updates, local first software was insufficient. It gave way to the likes of WordPress that could be accessed remotely so posts could come from anywhere. This helped kill the market for website authoring software.

Then of course came assholes. Even when you'd decide to start a blog, the Web 2.0 features that helped connect you to others like comments and *backs got abused by spammers and malware. Having a blog meant becoming an unpaid administrator and moderator or disabling all dynamic feedback mechanisms. In the worst case assholes turned your blog into a security liability.

Google adjusted their algorithms to favor recent content. This helped destroy the old style home pages because they became invisible to almost everyone. Unless a site had some very specific content that happened to tickle Google's algorithms just right its results would be on the 400th page of search results after a thousand blogspam links.

Finally social media just became the replacement for blogs and homepages. As an end user there's very little administration that needs to be done. Posting is quick and easy and doesn't ask for formalisms like document titles (naming this is often actually hard) on ontologies. The server administration is also handled by professionals so shitheads flooding your "site" don't rack up huge hosting bills. Content hosting is also handled with the same ease as other types of posts.

I'm not saying social media in inherently good or blogging is bad. I just think they contributed to killing the idea of having a home page.

Form submit etc to send network traffics are all available, JS is only needed when you wanna do something cute like network call (AJAX) or change dom elements without refreshing the page. And come up with kluge such as allowing js to change the route with in the domain.

Footnotes: 1.https://1stwebdesigner.com/pure-css-navigation-menus/

I don't have a static IP, but it only changes on the order of weeks or months. So a dynamic DNS configuration with a 5 minute TTL works fine for me.

I have no idea if web hosting is in my ISP's TOS, and I also don't care.

If you want to run code instead of just keep a static website, then you may need to get a cheap server from a multitude of companies that offer that (Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS etc) but I find that you can almost always get away with static sites which require next to no work and will stay up as long as those companies are still functioning (or don't shut down the free plan).

It's limited to those that are primarily interested in text (and the occasional image). Which probably prevents it from ever going mainstream (and thus an eternal september). What it's generally sacrificing is interactivity.

That seems like it's shooting more for the early internet. Which, yeah, has quite a bit of overlap with people who can code, but not as much as you're implying. And I do remember quite a few echo chambers on the early internet, but I remember a lot less of them without algorithmic feeds. Just by chance, you'd end up running across a bunch of people who disagree with you on a lot of things.

[1]https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

From my view in Gopherspace, Gemini is a better fit for the Gopher+TLS thing people keep trying to do which is both incompatible and doesn't square with Gopher being an ultra-light protocol, and thus most appealing to those people who thought Gopher would be the "new smol web" but found it's more its own thing. In particular, Gopher's signature strong menu-document hierarchy that a lot of us Gopher nerds like doesn't have any true parallel in Gemini.

I started gopher.floodgap.com back when it was gopher.ptloma.edu in the late 1990s largely as a historical preservation because I remembered all the cool stuff you could get there. Back then the Web hadn't metastasized to the Tetsuo blob it is today, so that obviously wouldn't have been the reason. I can't speak for the later adopters, but Gemini doesn't scratch my Gopher itches fully (see also https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-gopher-view-of-gemini.... , my notes on this from 2020).

I feel that if there were some way of promoting a Javascript-free web, everything the world needs is already there in all modern browsers.

I suspect that between HTML5, and indeed XHTML, and CSS and all the many modern image formats and so on, everything important that almost any site needs could be done using these tools and no JS at all.

And the result could also be interpreted and rendered successfully by much smaller simpler browsers, along the lines of Netsurf and Dillo, which are 10% of the size of a full dynamic-content browser or less.

The question is how.

A contest? Make the richest website you can that uses no Javascript, Typescript or anything else, and win a prize as well as promotion?

I don't think that's working at all. Their website is so unapproachable bad, that it fails in selling me reasons why I should even care about this or read further. Letting something standing on its own only really works well if you have a small amount to deliver. Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a desert of letters.