I’ve had a personal website since I was 15, in 1996. Back then it was hosted on geocities. I started to host my own blog somewhen around the year 2000. Over the decades I’ve migrated my blogging to other hosted platforms like livejournal, vox, posterous, wordpress.com, medium, etc but in 2015 I decided I want to stop experimenting with other platforms in order to have a forever home with my writing. I started to feel the importance of permalinks – how disruptive and saddening it is when cherished posts by other people go 404.
I’ve been an advocate of personal websites for a very long time. Back then I was pro-technology and didn’t fully understand my privilege in many ways. I was always advocating for personal websites without realising how much work it is for the average person. The technical part of it was fun for me so I had mistakenly assumed it would be fun for everyone else.
To have a self-hosted personal website, one must:
- find a good enough hosting provider – easier said than done
- be willing to pay a subscription every month
- learn ftp
- learn how to set up a database or static site generator
- simple html/css to customise some basic things
There are tasks that are just annoying in the beginning like setting up a database or learning how to use a static site generator, but once these things are set up one can relax and simply focus on the content. I thought it was worth the effort to have an almost blank canvas we can then put anything on. It is difficult to have such a space in reality, but online we can collect, express, share anything we want.
A couple of years ago my host emailed me to say that googlebot was hitting my site aggressively, so they had to block it to be fair to other users on the shared server. There were quite a few posts people were discovering through google so I was disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to find them anymore, but I wasn’t in a mental space to deal with it, so I accepted it.
It was then peaceful for a while. But running wordpress on its own is also stressful, people are always seeking to exploit its vulnerabilities. That was still bearable once I installed a couple of reputable security plugins. At this point people would be asking, why don’t I just run a static site? I chose wordpress for many reasons, but the main reason is because I wanted a fully dynamic website to so I can surface and display relationships between my content. So I chose to put up with all the quirks that come with running wordpress.
A few weeks ago this site was successfully hacked for the first time in its history, bypassing all its defences. My site was just one of the many that were affected in what we now know as the wp2shell exploit. I managed to fix it still. But just a week or two later they exploited a vulnerability in one of the plugins this site relies upon.
This site is over 10 years old and this is the first time attacks are happening consecutively. Why? AI, obviously. I feel dirty even typing the word out. It is being used to find vulnerabilities at a speed and depth that didn’t occur before.
So I patched the site again, and the next thing I know is that bots are clogging up matomo, which I use to view referral traffic etc. I’ve used robots.txt and .htaccess to block them but most of them are masquerading as humans. I look at the site’s access logs and it is just bots, bots, bots everywhere.
Somehow the idea that this site’s content is being scraped for AI is strangely violating.
I am contemplating putting this site behind cloudflare, but personally I don’t enjoy the user experience when I visit sites behind it. I can’t really explain why – it is just a temporary loading screen. It is weird to even contemplate putting a small personal website with low traffic behind cloudflare.
I’m spiritually exhausted with these bots. If I’m having so much frustration as a former technically-inclined person, I can’t imagine the average person trying to run a self-hosted personal website. Sadly platforms are the way to go for the average person.
I feel like this phenomenon is not just about personal websites. It feels like a harbinger of some sort. Some people would probably say we’re already over the harbinger stage for quite a while now. I’ve personally argued that we are probably living in the dark times but dark times are only obvious when viewed with the lens of history.
Maybe people think I am exaggerating: how can I associate AI bots rampaging personal websites with the dark ages? It is the lack of care and thought in everything. The callousness. Not just about AI, but everything.
It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience. Why should I take the time and effort – the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words – when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.