On the Slow Return of the Personal Website
For a decade we rented our corners of the internet. Now, quietly, people are building rooms of their own again.
Kristina Schadek
February 3, 2026
For most of the last decade, writing online meant writing into someone else's machine. The platform owned the design, the algorithm owned the audience, and we owned, at best, the words — until the terms of service changed.
Lately I keep finding small, personal sites: hand-built pages with opinionated typography, a mailing list, and no comment section. They load fast. They look like the person who made them. And they are read by exactly as many people as need to read them.
I think this is more than nostalgia. A personal website is a long-term bet that your ideas are worth a permanent address. Feeds reward the immediate; a site rewards the cumulative. Ten good essays on your own domain will outlive ten thousand posts on any timeline.
This blog is my own version of that bet. Slow content, on purpose, at a stable address. Come back whenever you like — nothing here will have moved.