THE HYPERTEXT REVOLT ==================== The Web was supposed to be something people built. Not "content." Not an endless vertical stream of interchangeable rectangles. Not a profile rented from a company where every thought, photograph, song, video, argument and joke is pressed into the same template and ranked by a machine whose goals are not your goals. A website can be a place. It can have doors. Wrong turns. A basement. An attic. A ridiculous splash page. A map. A guestbook. A radio stream. A game that makes no commercial sense. A collection of documents nobody would approve as a product. It can have a page that exists because you thought the page should exist. Hypertext means the material can have shape. One idea can point sideways into another. A reader can choose a trail instead of being given a queue. The author can build an environment instead of merely submitting an object to a feed. The modern platform bargain is convenient, but convenience is not the same thing as ownership and a feed is not the same thing as a site. So: buy a domain. Run a server if you want. Use a boring host if you do not. Write HTML. Write Gopher menus. Put up an IRC server. Build a BBS. Make a MUD. Make a gallery that does not look like Instagram. Make a station that never could have survived a product meeting. Link outward. Let other people leave your site. Expect them to come back because they remember where it was, not because an algorithm pushed you into their next slot. The Web does not need another feed. It needs webmasters.