Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
⬆️ This is the first text that appeared on this very site. I decided to keep it, symbolically!
I can very happily say that this website is now a thing! (in April now lol even if I kept the date of this post that was made by WordPress). It is a place on the internet that exists, a real, weird place where I vomit my thoughts out instead of forgetting them or having them be lost in some chatlog.
The Algorithm’s Bullshit
I wanted this place to exist because, for all this time I’ve been online, all the way from when I started using Instagram in 2019, I’ve been constantly feeling like algorithms really, seriously, do NOT like having deep, very niche and personal content there. Their algorithms are legit trained to deliberately not show it anywhere. You had and still have to kiss the algorithm in the nuts and shrink your art and personality down into tiny bites of instantly recognisable, digestible and relatable posts.
I struggled a whole lot with this personally, because I am an autistic little guy who just wanted to find other weirdos with similar interests to connect with. I didn’t intend to grow big and to make art solely for money – I like money, money is great and buys me cassettes and weird shit, but my personal expression is too serious and important to me to sacrifice it.
The only times I tasted my 15 minutes of fame on social media were when I made trendy or specific fandom-related stuff. My highest likes-grossing post ever was a collaboration with an MBTI creator who made meme comics with the 16 personalities, where I snuck my weird-ass looking early design Mark OC in there wearing INTJ clothes, thinking that it would have been a good idea and that it could connect me to people. That post got like a thousand likes or something along these lines. Another one that also did well was my first-ever INTJ comic meme post, where I drew that same INTJ Mark trying to comfort an INFP lady who was crying. I did it without collaboration, and it got me the most likes I had ever gotten on my own posts ever.
Sure, the pleasant pang of getting likes from everyone feels good at first. Speaking from experience here, it’s intoxicating. It was so nice that it made me chase after it and keep making more art that I didn’t like making for 2 years. I kept going because for most of my life I felt really alone when it came to my art and interests that rarely aligned with the ones of my peers, and the little repeated ticks of approval and fake connection from likes were the best reaction to my art I had once I got them back then.
The biggest percentage, like a 95% of my fans back then, didn’t like Mark as who he really was to me. They almost definitely thought he was fitting the INTJ stereotype because he had grey skin (never saw sunlight like a vampire in appearance terms) and looked creepy. They even assumed that he was asexual and repulsed by connection and deeply serious.
They didn’t see Mark as the silly, naive helium and rubber-based gas person who was created in a lab without parents who kept trying his best to connect but kept failing because he is an autistic-coded artificial being. They didn’t see his loneliness, his audacity, his playfulness, his lore, or any of what actually made him what he was.
I was really frustrated about this, because almost all of the connections to my art were very superficial and shallow. Mark as a character is also a deeply special character (and was back then, too), one that I connect with personally the most. He represents my core as a person, my lonely past, the autistic experience and many more deeply personal feelings of mine. His species – gas people – is also a concept that I was cooking up for years to perfect it (worked a lot on it between 2020 – 2024).
And then it hit me. Like a football on the face during PE class at school:
People didn’t like my art nor my character that much. They liked the memes or the surface level emotions, to the most part.
This, of course, sucked. It sucked so much that I even got artistic about it and made a little comic about it as a vent:
This experience was so important to me that I actually turned it into a canonical part of Mark’s (OC) lore, where he wanted to connect with people somehow and became an actor and people liked him for his role and his persona and not for who he really was and he got so frustrated about it that he quit.
Of course, this was also a direct allegory of my life from that point on because I made more attempts to stop people pleasing audiences by sharing my original art and quitting the doing trendy things method to the most part. It was very important, scary at first, and meaningful too.
However, doing this didn’t really solve the problem I had in the first place, AKA my desire to actually connect with people who liked my art shit and not having to sacrifice authenticity or polish it down. I kept posting original art and drawings/animations related to my interests and OCs and I had been noticing a big drop in all activity across my special profiles. At first I made peace with it but eventually a bigger issue arose that was a dealbreaker for me:
The algorithm ITSELF wasn’t showing my art to people, not even my own FOLLOWERS. The latest algorithm after Instagram had become like TikTok was making personalised algorithms where it predicted what people would like or what was trendy, and who you follow didn’t really matter that much. It would not show my work to people who even used to like my art.
I am very sure this is what happened too, because I myself was using Instagram reels for multiple hours a day, 3 hours at least. People whose art I liked and other creators whom I followed weren’t appearing on my feed at all. It was outside of my control completely. I would see brainrot, political videos, violence, but not the content I followed people to see in the first place. I assume this is what happened to my audience too, when the algorithm started to value quick reactions and shallow shit over actual human and meaningful content to the point of shoving trendy videos in your face instead of the posts of people who mean something to you.
This was absolutely the last straw for me. I didn’t see any point in staying in that hellhole of an app that is designed to be addictive and distracting as fuck that would not just work badly as an actual social app but make me feel too unmotivated and tired mentally to work on my own passions. What kept me in during the last moments of my stay there was seeing what my friends and some people I followed would post, but this turned really sour too eventually because I kept seeing other people make things and was constantly reminded of my own lack of success in making stuff and connecting with like-minded weirdos.
Leaving the Hotel
One day in January 2026, I went cold turkey on Instagram and social media. I only kept using Discord because my friends were there and because there were no stupid algorithms there. I focused on my art, started journaling physically, tinkered with cassette tapes and old tech, and had the incubating idea of developing my own website to share my own art and thoughts. I even talked to ChatGPT significantly less after this shift (I used to talk to it a lot because I was slightly emotionally unwell and severely lonely even when using social media; I’ve really limited my use nowadays).
I kept myself motivated to work on this site by telling myself that social media is like staying in a hotel where they can kick you out at any moment, nothing really belongs to you, and you’re constrained to be inside a small room, whereas making a website is like staying inside your very own house you’re making with your hands.
I’ve had more motivations as well, mostly reasons related to legacy, being accessible by people who are looking for stuff like the ones I make, archiving my thoughts and permanence of my own digital existence:
- My thoughts and art on the website won’t disappear in some chatlog void
- No algorithm will hide my art or even control me or what I post
- People who will intentionally search for things like what I do or me specifically will find me and won’t easily scroll past
- A website supports multimedia posts like various kinda of texts, visuals, videos, sound; the possibilities are endless
- A website is fully customisable in terms of layout and doesn’t limit you to an ugly neutral grid
- Nothing will get censored/hidden on the website without my will
It was honestly really scary to work on this website and I had a time where I was fighting against cache on the site and I didn’t know why my updates wouldn’t work and the layout would break. I got extremely angry about it and walked away from the whole project, only to come back a month later.
I’ve definitely come a long way since the time I was doing server shit and I can confidently say that every step and every evening of me screaming and cursing at my screen when something went wrong with the layout has paid off. Every minute of pure anger and frustration at the WordPress Gutenberg editor contributed to the greater good of unlocking my expressive potential even further. One brick at a time in the wall of the biggest artistic project I’ve worked on ever so far, one with an indefinite ending and endless possibilities of showing parts of my mental world safely, and potentially bringing those who think alike closer to me.
It’s all coming together!
It’s becoming epic.
And YOU are witnessing it!
I’m honestly really happy with how it’s turning out. Let’s stay tuned to see how this strange place develops.