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Like every other person my age, I use the internet as if I have nothing else to do. I often find myself constrained to the same three platforms, those being Twitter, Reddit, and Discord.
Limiting yourself to only these platforms may work out for you if you have an active lifestyle, but for someone who's laid-back with nobody to talk to in real life, the internet almost becomes a second reality.
Don't get me wrong, the World Wide Web is the best tool for communication. With the Internet, anyone with a connection and a capable device is able to talk to anyone they want to, at any time they want to, from anywhere they want to. People can share information, pictures, videos, and so much more without ever having to meet the person on the other end of the screen. The Internet is a massively useful utility for enabling communication between minorities, who otherwise have nobody else they can communicate with.
But just like everything else made in this nightmare, if it's not profitable, you either have to (a) find a way to make it profitable, or (b) just give up. The push for monetizing every existing thing has nullified the internet from a community of personalized spaces for people to express themselves, to a monetized mess of Corporate Memphis graphics and the same template used for every corporate site in existence.
With the massive monetization of the internet, every small platform that wasn't profitable was pushed off the Web. Successful companies were bought out by larger companies, who would then discard the brand they had bought without a second thought. Massive pieces of the once creative Internet were lost thanks to corporate greed.
Thanks to this, the Internet as we know it today exists solely of social media platforms, Google, and the websites of large cable networks.
I believe centralizing the internet was a massive mistake, not only because of the privacy issues involved with social media services, but the great lack of creativity that comes along with it.
I use the internet as my place to express my creativity in a way I see fit, without the need for endless monetization. The internet is my escape from the hellscape of Capitalism, as well as a place to communicate with other individuals who share my interests and views. While social media platforms help me communicate and show off my projects, they don't let me make my space on the internet my own.
The internet is so much more than a couple sites owned and operated by multi-billion dollar companies. The average internet user is missing out on a lot when it comes to what the internet truly is: a place to be yourself.
Here's the ever-so-common part of the story where I say the ever-so-common phrase: "It doesn't have to be this way."
If you're tired of the current Capitalist hellscape that is the World Wide Web, or if you want to have a fun time picking up a new hobby, resources exist to help you get your feet wet.
Here's some resources on how to make your piece of the internet truly yours:
A page by Sadgrl.online, highlighting what you can do.
w3schools.com, a website I got most of my HTML knowledge from.
A page by Sadgrl.online on how to surf the broader Internet
And if at any point you need help, your best friend is a search engine. After all, that's what the internet was made for.
At the end of the day, there's so much more on the internet than Twitter and Reddit. By limiting yourself to these platforms, you're missing out on a lot of what the internet has to offer.