I first got on the Internet back in the late 90s.
Back then, the Web felt like an endless frontier of personal homepages, hand-crafted HTML blogs, and independent IRC servers. Everyone had their own unique corner of the digital universe.
Today, most of the internet has been centralized into a few massive walled gardens (social media platforms). People no longer build personal websites; they rent space on someone else’s platform.
When you rely entirely on third-party platforms, you are a “digital tenant” or a “net homeless person” — your identity, content, and audience can be erased with a single algorithm update or terms-of-service change.
That is why owning your domain, running your own server, and generating static files remains the ultimate act of digital sovereignty.
