Does Having a Personal Blog Make Sense in 2025?

Something has disappeared from the internet: that disorganized, creative, and strange character of websites from the late 90s and early 2000s. There were no frameworks, much less predefined templates dictating how a website was supposed to look.

In some ways, this is good—millions of users don't have to struggle to understand the navigation conventions of a website. But on the other hand, we've condemned ourselves to a homogeneity of interfaces that, in my personal experience, becomes boring. But what does this have to do with the usefulness of a blog in 2025?

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a website that explained what the "IndieWeb" was. Being a big fan of indie music and the internet, I couldn't resist clicking on that link.

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web." We are a community of independent and personal websites based on principles like: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing first on your own site (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

I thought it was a great idea, so much so that I started experimenting with 11ty, a static site generator that's quite popular in the IndieWeb community.

The Dominance of Platforms and the Indie Alternative

The IndieWeb won't change the current trend of the web—99.8% of users will remain in "walled gardens" because they're simply more convenient. Your friends, family, and work are there. But I believe the influence of a small group of indies is healthy for the future of the internet.

For example, webmentions is an open web standard popular in the IndieWeb that allows websites (blogs) to communicate with each other. This gives that small touch of "social network" to a group of personal websites without centralization, without using algorithms. A web outside of closed gardens.

My first attempt at blogging was 15 years ago, and the arrival of social media made me completely abandon that idea. Now I see that was a mistake. It would have been valuable for me to have worked on my ideas, projects, and opinions more publicly, even if nobody read them. The process of writing and making sense of your opinions is an escape from "doomscrolling."

I'm going to recall and organize the reasons why I previously dismissed having a blog (my last attempt was in 2015). Then I'll write the reasons why I've now changed my mind.

Why I Previously Dismissed Having a Personal Website

• I would have used WordPress, and I didn't like the idea of fixed costs, the time spent maintaining plugins, and keeping everything updated to avoid an undesirable hack.
• When it comes to having a blog, I've always believed in being the owner of the content I create rather than relying on a closed platform, which is why I dismissed Medium, Substack, and everything else.
• The exercise of writing and drafting wasn't something I felt necessary to work on beyond what's done at work or on social media.
• Social media seemed sufficient and an opportunity to find clients and more contacts. Why have a blog?
• It was enough for me to share my personal projects with close friends and coworkers.
• Making your work public always generates insecurity and is also a leap of "courage" to open up and speak publicly about certain topics.
• Let's be honest, before Covid, the world was a very different place.
• I wasn't deeply familiar with static websites; my development experience almost always required databases and some CMS.
• "AI" (LLMs) didn't exist, and part of the barrier to building a website from scratch with a completely different framework than what I was used to was the time needed to accomplish it. An LLM significantly reduces that time.

Why It's Worth Having a Blog in 2025

• Writing on a blog is much more complex than posting a story on Instagram or a Tweet, but that exercise has benefits in reducing your "doomscrolling," of only consuming content that an algorithm decides for you, of only producing small fragments of ideas and emotions.
• Processing your ideas and opinions, making your personal projects public, even if nobody reads them, organizes your mind and potentially organizes your projects too.
• I'm a resident of the United States, and maintaining a bilingual website allows me to constantly practice writing in English without neglecting my native language.
• A static website doesn't require (as much) maintenance.
• It will be a positive contribution to the web for an indie movement to exist, going against the current and creating new ways of thinking about the Internet experience in a more decentralized way. Mastodon, Bluesky, and federated protocols, I believe, go hand in hand with the IndieWeb.
• Your ideas, everything you do on that website, will be on the Internet for a long time. That repository on GitHub has a higher probability of longevity than any closed platform.
• I have several professional projects that need their space outside of a CV; they should be "case studies." Having my own portfolio outside of LinkedIn was something I've postponed for too long.
• I've been using Obsidian a lot, which is like Apple Notes but on steroids and where you have control over your information. It's based on Markdown, and Markdown works very well with 11ty and LLMs. There's an interesting symbiosis there.
• I have many links, notes, and information that I could make public, and this website partly seeks to do that.
• Your personal website is a good way to keep a "log" of your projects, work, and side projects.
• The sooner you start recording, processing, and exposing your important projects, the better. It wasn't so simple for me to remember aspects of projects that are already 4 or 5 years old. It's always better to record everything as soon as you finish an important project.

Conclusion

To conclude, I'll make a prediction. Not only people close to the tech world will see having a personal website as an opportunity. Soon, LLM agents will likely be autonomous enough to create a complete static website with automatic publishing, with all the customizations the user desires, and it will take only a few minutes. But I don't think this solution will come from the IndieWeb world. Probably a Cloud platform for hosting static websites will see the opportunity to democratize access to these tools and, in the process, exponentially expand its users.

Ultimately, having a personal blog in 2025 isn't about competing with major platforms or expecting to go viral with a post. It's more about escaping the algorithm, organizing ideas that would otherwise remain as fragments on social media, and contributing to the internet that personal touch that has been lost. The benefit is more for oneself, but if someone else benefits from the content you create, that would be a great bonus. Perhaps this is a small niche, but I think it's one worth exploring.

My intention is to publish regularly, not always with long posts, gradually improving this website and experimenting with the various open standards of the decentralized web. If you've read this far, I invite you to get in touch with me through Webmentions.