The personal website is coming back because people are rediscovering something the early Web made obvious: the Internet is more interesting when individuals have places of their own. We spent roughly twenty years moving into a handful of very large apartment buildings. Some people are starting to build houses again.

In atproto, every app is a projection of the whole Atmosphere, just like Feedly and Google Reader are projections of the entire Blogosphere. You mostly “decentralize” by swapping your hosting, and/or by making and trying new apps. Running many full copies of the Bluesky database server is possible, but it’s not any more useful than running many copies of Google Reader.

I wanted a simple blogging platform that I could run from my own Markdown files. No intermediaries. No bloated UI. No JavaScript. No databases and migration scripts. No insecure plugins. Just a git folder, an Obsidian vault or a synchronized SyncThing directory, and the ability to create and modify content by simply writing text files, wherever I am.

Drop a Markdown file in the directory, and it's live. Edit it, and the changes propagate. Delete it, and it's gone.