It's 2026. Every "platform" wants to be the place where you exist. They give you a profile, a handle, a feed, a verification checkmark. They promise reach, audience, community. They take your data, your attention, your words — and you get to keep nothing.
So this year, like every year since 2016, I renewed a domain and paid a small amount of money to a stranger in another country so that some files I wrote could live on a machine I control.
The case for static HTML in 2026
A static HTML page is the most resilient publishing format humans have invented. It doesn't need a runtime. It doesn't need a database. It loads in 80ms on a 3G connection. It works on a browser from 2008. It works on a browser from 2033. It works on a browser that someone is going to write in 2041.
No platform can revoke it. No algorithm can hide it. No company can pivot, get acquired, run out of money, or "sunset" your decade of writing.
What I run
- A small VPS, paid yearly, with my name on the WHOIS.
- Cloudflare in front, for DNS and a little DDoS help.
- Neocities for the public-facing playground you are reading.
- A handful of cron jobs and bash scripts that mostly do nothing.
Total monthly cost: less than a coffee in a city I don't live in.
What I don't do
I don't track you. There is no analytics, no cookie banner, no consent pop-up. The only log this site produces is the standard reverse-proxy access log, which I rarely look at.
I don't run ads. I don't have a newsletter funnel. I don't ask for your email. I don't have a "join the community" form.
What I do is write. Sometimes about code. Sometimes about life. Sometimes just a list of things I made this month.
The tradeoff
The honest version: nobody reads this. My biggest post on the open web, by traffic, gets fewer views than a mediocre tweet from 2014. The signal-to-noise ratio on the public web is brutal in 2026.
But that's not why I keep doing it. I keep doing it because this URL is mine. The address bar belongs to me, the files belong to me, the history belongs to me. Every word I write here is on a server that owes me nothing and answers to no one.
"The web is still the only mass medium where a single human can publish to the world for free, and we are watching a generation choose not to."
What you can do
- Buy a domain. Your name, if it's available.
- Set up a free Neocities account. It takes ten minutes.
- Write three things. The first two will be bad. The third will be okay.
- Link to other people who do this. That's the whole social graph.
That's it. That's the post. See you on the other side of the curl.
— Hendra, somewhere on the equator, 2026-06-13