As you sit, cozy on the couch, crunching away on chips, lost in the endless glow of Netflix, you might laugh at the thought of having your own website. “Why would I need one? What do I have to offer to the world?” you might ask with a flicker of doubt in your eyes. But listen closely, because you have something—something rare, something uniquely yours.
Think of your fingerprints—those delicate, intricate patterns that belong to you and you only. No one else can replicate them, no one else will ever have them in 2083 or 3050. Just thinking so far away into to future gives me goosebumps...
And just like those fingerprints, your story, your talents, your voice—it's all one of a kind. The world needs to hear it, even if you don’t realize it yet. Maybe, as you nibble on your chips, there’s a movie critic within you, or a visionary costume designer, or a poet with a quiet heart waiting to speak. I know how it is to feel that maybe there is something about you that is so unique and yet you lack the courage to roar and only throw a silent meow, purring like a shy cat when you are a fierce lion!
We all know social media, those endless scrolls of likes and shares. It's all too familiar, isn’t it? We pour our thoughts into posts, but it’s not really ours, is it? Our content is owned by the platforms, scattered across a sea of other (curated) voices. You can filter your feed, but the soul of your uniqueness gets lost in the noise. On Instagram, you might scroll endlessly, but there’s always a piece of you that feels unseen, buried under the weight of endless hashtags and fleeting trends. Even on a decentralized platform content gets lost, buried under new piles of fresh content.How can you showcase a portfolio without having the possibility to filter your content? Only if you have followers who are particularly interested in your progress you will be able to showcase on your profile the whole array of your talents.
I think of myself—someone with so many talents, trying to spread my creativity across a thousand platforms, and oh, how draining it was. Social media demands your time, your energy, your focus, but for someone who’s meant to create, the thought of trading my time for exposure feels like a theft. Without a team, you're left alone, wrestling with frustration, wasting time on something that takes you farther from your true self. I have been there, trying to post in order to be discovered as a painter. It drained me.
So I made a choice. I took my WordPress blog and turned it into my own little space—a website, a place where I could breathe. A place where I could blog, where I could show my work in a way that felt mine. No more jumping between platforms, no more chasing likes. Now, I create for the love of it, and I share it with the world, at my own pace. I don't feel like I have to rush. I take my time. My website won’t vanish tomorrow, won’t disappear in the ether of a broken algorithm. It’s mine, and that brings me peace. Of course that there are costs implied, but if you do not place a bet on yourself nobody else will. I feel that with a website you create your own safety cocoon, especially if you love writing, like I do.
It’s easy, some might say, if you’re just writing and not selling a product. I get it. I don’t have a stockpile of t-shirts waiting to be sold, no flashy product to advertise (yet). But for me, it’s a step away from the clutter of social media, that shallow saturation of impersonal posts and perfect images. And I believe, just maybe, in the future, people will crave something more: something real, something raw, something they can feel in their hearts—an authentic blog with emotion, not a feed of perfect selfies and endless hashtags.
You have something to share. Don’t let the noise drown it out. What do you love to do so much that, even if billions of dollars came your way tomorrow, you’d still do it? Writing, painting, baking, coding, anything—pursue it. Build a website around it. And in the years to come, when you look back, you’ll see your progress, your journey laid out before you like a beautiful, growing story. You’ll realize—maybe, just maybe—you’ve improved in ways you didn’t even notice. Change is slow, but every step forward, no matter how small, is monumental. As I was adding pictures to my gallery with paintings and tattoos I looked at that and stood in silence realizing how much stamina I needed in order to grow and pursue that work. It can push you in your hardest moment to be able to look at past work and say: hey, that was me doing that, I have it in me!
And if writing stirs your soul, add a blog section to your website. There are still souls out there who want to read, who want to hear your thoughts, to peek inside the labyrinth of your mind. Write. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be you.
I also agree with everything you say in this post. But I have to go further, and thank you for saving me from a terrible mistake. Because, I put monetary rewards before quality content as a priority in my latest website project. So, as well as thanking you for that, I'll thank you for your inspiration that led me to write Why am I creating my Hive Frontend?
I agree that WordPress is a great blogging platform. But in recent years, I've found it has developed into more than I need. So, I'm working on a project to extract my best content from Hive to showcase on a free instance of Cloudflare Pages. Once it is working fully, I hope to make it available to other Hive users. Because I'm aware that many people are overwhelmed at the idea of setting up a website as well as maintaining a Hive presence.
!BBH
Your initiative sounds great and I think it would be of great use for everybody else. Extracting the best of the best or finding a way to create built in filters in order to find content of a certain nature in a user's profile would be amazing:)
I agree totally with you Lady Mary.
We recently came to a decision to only use our website, as the social media sites are hi-jacked by scammers here. So, we closed the Papillon and our personal sites on FB, X, and also on YouTube. I am glad to see that many of our followers here in South Africa are doing the same.
The Papillon Foundation website is all that we have now, and no need for us to run around on other sites in order to expose our activities. On Hive I have the website address in my profile, and that's fair enough.
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Oh wow I congratulate you! Have you felt a sort of liberation that came with this decision? I don't know how you procedeed with social media, I personally found it exhausting to try to reach out audiences on so many platforms to make my talents known. So I am not alone in this feeling of frustration that social media "work" has given to so many of us.
I think it also is something dependant on the personality type. I guess that if you love the camera you can love to post on social media all day..who knows lol?
Thank you, and no liberation, as I just regarded it as closing another chapter in my book of live. I have to say that I don't like idle chatter, and there was no value for my time on there. If you mean by saying that if you love the camera by posting selfies, that I can tell you that I have never done a selfie, as I don't like them. To post on social media all day will surely bore me out of my mind. !LOL
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Best decision ever made! Time is so precious for people and businesses alike, social media feeds on it.
Totally agreed!
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