Back from the dead
I killed my personal site in May 2018.
It was the GDPR month of horror. Dozens of old clients approached me to help them get their privacy policies online. I was knee-deep into getting our own privacy policy for Kirby ready with our lawyer and everything just felt like shit.
Instead of caring for my own site, I simply switched it off. I set up a redirect to the Kirby website, but later the SSL certificate expired and I couldn't even be bothered to fix that.
It's kind of ironic, when you are working full-time on a content management system and you talk about the IndieWeb for years, but at the same time you can't even get your shit together and run your own website.
Looking back, my dead website was a reflection of how I felt about my profession. It was a low point in my career. I was extremely frustrated by the state of the web. The work for Kirby 3 was absolutely overwhelming. It should have launched by then already. Everything felt exhausting and broken. The GDPR chaos was just the final cut.
Killing it was almost like taking a break from the web. For the longest time I felt lost afterwards. The work on Kirby kept me up and I'm glad about that. But the digital loneliness that Tobias describes in his article was all around me.
Fast-forward to today: This week, I attended beyond tellerrand. This conference has always played a big part in my career. It gave me the necessary push in the right direction so many times before. I can't exactly say what it is. It's not a particular talk or topic or conversation. It's the sum of all of that.
Maybe it's just me, but there was a special mood in the crowd this time. More cheering when speakers entered the stage. More clapping after each talk. I don't really know. Maybe I'm just projecting here.
At the very end, Tantek entered the stage and spoke about taking back the web. There were no surprises in this talk. He summarized the catastrophic situation of the social web and introduced IndieWeb ideas as a possible solution. And yet, this talk gives me goosebumps when I think about it.
There's a pretty clear message in my head since then: the web is not lost. The friendships are not lost. The positivity and excitement that we once all had is not lost. It's time for a new beginning.