Life Beyond the Feed
Tim Potter
Designer, maker and co-founder of Little Thunder
On personal websites, owning your own corner of the internet, and why authenticity is becoming more valuable than reach.
- #Personal
- #Web
- #AI
- #Design
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal websites. Not because they’re making a comeback. Not because they’re suddenly fashionable again. Simply because they feel increasingly valuable.
For years, most of us stopped building destinations and started building audiences. We traded our own websites for platforms. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube. The promise was simple: publish here and we’ll help people find you.
For a while, it worked. The internet became more connected, more social and easier to navigate. Content found us instead of us having to search for it.
But somewhere along the way, we lost something.
The web used to feel full of small, personal spaces. Websites built by people who cared enough to make a little corner of the internet their own. They weren’t always polished. They weren’t always updated. But they felt human.
Today, most of our work lives inside feeds. A post gets a few days of attention, then disappears beneath the next wave of content. Success is measured in impressions, engagement and whatever the algorithm decides matters this week.
That’s part of the reason I launched this website. Not as a portfolio. Not as a business tool. Just somewhere to put things.
The stuff I’m building. The experiments. Thoughts on AI. Side projects that don’t really fit on LinkedIn. Ideas that might only be interesting to a handful of people. Things that deserve a home rather than a timeline.
Ironically, AI has made this feel even more important.
As creating content becomes easier, personal perspective becomes more valuable. The internet is flooded with articles, videos, images and opinions generated at incredible speed. What becomes scarce isn’t content. It’s authenticity. Experience. Curiosity. The strange collection of interests that make each of us different.
A personal website won’t compete with social platforms for reach. That’s fine. It doesn’t need to. A post on a website can sit quietly for years until the right person discovers it. It doesn’t have to win the day. It doesn’t have to go viral. Its job is simply to exist.