Hey! 👋
Welcome to Finnegan's Fox Den, where fantasy and fun come to life, and where we definitely don't steal lines from not-so-indie-anymore franchises.
foxden.one is my personal website. I put here whatever I feel like is worth sharing with the world.
Pre-ramble
(it's like a preamble but rambley)
You might be wondering, why would one make a personal webpage in this day and age? I mean, for each role a personal website might serve, there is an application service. If you want to share some info about yourself, there is LinkedIn. If you want to publish things you have made, there is GitHub. If you want to connect to people, there is social media. And so on.
I think this is precisely the reason. Think of the early internet. Think of something like geocities. These services, social media, developer platforms, they took what was once a wonderful, diverse network of millions of unique creations, websites, and turned it into a monotone, boring, generalized set of the same 3 websites, where we go to do basically everything (the tag line "X the everything app" really sums it up). There is no true individuality on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or YouTube; that's not what these things are designed for. They are here to monopolize the web, so they can hammer as much personal data out of you as legally possible (or illegaly).
This is why I think we need more personal websites! As I said, the world wide web was once this decentralized network, where one could truly go exploring an almost unlimited amount of unique places, like when wondering around a new city for the first time, seeing all the unique buildings, architecture, restaurants, cinemas, parks and so on. It wasn't a controlled, directed experience, where some dark force in the background is serving you content for its own, monetary purposes; I mean it was really like exploring in the true sense of the world. You were free to go whereever you wanted, to see what you actually wanted to see and not what gets served to you.
The only way to bring this world back, as I suggested before, is if people start making their own unique places on the web again. You can view this pre-ramble as an appeal, or my justification for why I decided to make this site, and it's really both. It is not very likely we will return to a less dystopian state of the web any time soon, but, you know, it's good to remind ourselves what we had and what we can have.
- Finn
