My personal blog is no longer public. From now on, first-time readers must issue an access request which I approve or deny. Authenticating oneself is passwordless. Magic links are sent to the email address provided by the user if they’re approved. Sessions for approved readers last for thirty days. Approval can be revoked and users can be blocked.

All of this is new. I rolled out these changes approximately one week ago for two reasons:

1. Publicly hosting personal and professional blog posts on one website resulted in a jarring experience for visitors. What recruiters and peers want to see — technical blog posts, achievements — made friends and family cringe. Age-old wisdom scores one point while idealism sits at zero: the personal and professional don’t mix.
2. I had privacy and safety concerns about who exactly was reading my personal blog. I’ll leave it at that.

I didn’t have some big-brained philosophy for why I made my blog private. I just wanted a clean separation between personal and professional content, and control over who had access to my thoughts, feelings, and goings-on. After reflection, however, I realized that I may’ve stumbled upon something interesting.

Before this project, I hadn’t worked with user logins and sessions. I knew that I didn’t want to roll my own authentication, but I wasn’t sure what types of frameworks are popular or resilient. Basically, I was conscious of just how little I knew.

Two years ago, this project would’ve required reading blogs, finding inspiration, scanning through GitHub, critically evaluating frameworks, reading documentation, and learning JavaScript and-or TypeScript. These days, we have LLMs. AI can accelerate our learning, evaluate and iteratively refine our plans, provide instructions for configuring infrastructure, and write code. What would have previously taken me a week took about one day.

You already know that AI empowers us to build things — that wasn’t what I meant earlier when I said that “I may’ve stumbled upon something interesting.” What I realized is that we are now empowered to build our own idiosyncratic and exclusive online social institutions instead of relying on social media platforms — and to do so in a powerful way which frameworks like WordPress never made practical.

The early internet saw personal websites and frameworks for blogs. Simpler days! Most people were (and still are) unable or unwilling to build or maintain anything online, however, so social media platforms eventually emerged. I wouldn’t argue that the principal value proposition of social media platforms was eliminating technical complexity — that wasn’t ever why people made social media profiles. However, it’s difficult not to see technical complexity as a critical latent factor.

Instead of relying on social media platforms in order to stay connected, which comes with terms and conditions and weird sociological experiments attached, what if more of us did something like what I did — secure a domain name and, using a tool like Claude, build your own sovereign little online social institution for you and your people to confer. Instead of conforming with the tracks laid by big social media platforms, each site can be shaped by whatever the owner wants. Maybe images are most important. Maybe text. Maybe content should be private. Maybe public. Who knows. My model — a private personal blog with email notifications — is incredibly basic, but that’s what I wanted. It allows my family — many of whom live in faraway places like Germany — to keep up with me. That model may not fit for everybody’s needs, but it works for me.

To be clear, although I see potential and value, I don’t see this becoming a viral phenomenon. I don’t think most people want to build or manage their own website (which comes with operational costs and serious security concerns), assistance from artificial intelligence notwithstanding. It’s nevertheless easy for me to picture a reality where the internet is bespeckled with many tiny sovereign social institutions with their own unique shape made by people like myself who want to do their own thing. If that ever happens, out of everybody, I think that activists, dissidents, and outsiders¹ — the kinds of people who tend to inform new fashions, ideas, and beliefs — will be some of the first to do it.

I have no abstract argument about decentralization, data ownership, open source, whatever. Can you hear me yawning from miles away? Normal people do not care about those things and never will. They just want to be where their friends are. As far as the average person is concerned, creating a personal website has been accessible to them for years. The crucial difference, insofar as they may see or appreciate it, is they no longer need to pick from ready-made templates; rather, they can now imagine and build whatever site they want completely from scratch.

We hear a lot about the virtues of inclusion and connectivity. Western society has probably never been as inclusive or connected as it is right now; yet, paradoxically, people have probably never felt so alienated or lonely. How we wound up in this situation is another topic, but it seems to me like boundaries and exclusivity help to create an atmosphere of intimacy which so many people feel is lacking from their lives. If someone in our network creates a sovereign online space, we either know about it or we don’t. We’re either in or out. There’s no platform to look anybody up on. No awkward friend request from somebody we’d rather not hear from. We might be able to find someone’s online space if it’s indexed, but maybe not. That can sting, but finally being invited inside of someone’s little world is special.

Altogether, what I realized after making my personal blog private is that AI makes bespoke social architecture cheap and accessible enough that we no longer need to conform ourselves to standardized software like social media platforms. I don’t think most people will build or maintain their own websites for fairly evident reasons; however, if more people become conscious of what’s accessible instead of what’s merely possible then I do think that certain types of people — probably the same people who tend to create trends which everyone else follows — may begin building their own sovereign little idiosyncratic online social worlds as an alternative (or accompaniment to) big social media platforms. Average people have been able to create personal websites for many years. The crucial difference is that, as a consequence of AI, imagination is the new limit — not whatever ready-made templates which Squarespace makes available. Personally, I’d like to see what kinds of things people make. I think they’d like that too — if this were to ever become a thing.