Own Your Data and Your Online Identity

A case for the decentralized indie web

Our voices are important. They deserve to be heard, and they deserve their own website.

Many of us have been burned by corporate-owned social media at some point. I myself have had posts removed by Facebook, even though the link I shared came from a legitimate news website and the comment I made along with it was not directed at a specific person, they still claimed it was against their community standards.

In any case, it's now 2025 and our online content and identities are more vulnerable and more important than ever. Some would argue, even critical to our very lives.

At a time when our personal identities are no longer safe in the hands of the government, and the content that we create are insecure and likely to be sold, or stolen, in the hands of mega corporate-owned platforms. We need to be the owners of our identities and our creations Our data. I really don't want to be an alarmist, but our Free Speech rights and private data are currently under attack by our very own president, but that's a story that deserves it's own post.

Why shouldn't I use Facebook, X, Threads or other social platforms?

You can if you want! But remember, when you create on corporate-owned social media you are the product.
Otherwise you are consenting to the fact that they control who sees your thoughts. They control what you can write about. They control how you write and the pictures you share. Have you ever had your post removed by Facebook? It feels like a punch in the gut.

When you control your own website, your thoughts aren't subject to the politics and policies of it's mega-billionaire owner. I'm looking at Zuck and Musk.

If you're in business as a professional artist, it's vital to be in control of your relationship with your audience, clients, gallerists and customers. I know this from my 10 years in marketing and 6 years that I ran my own coffee roasting business. A website is a big part of that control.

As an individual, you also have an equally important reason for not giving away your control over your data and the content your create, and how you share it. When you do, that gives them influence and control over you that shouldn't belong to them. But that's exactly what you're doing when you put content on their sites.

You should be in control of how you represent yourself, your art, your ideas, your religion, your politics, or any other aspect of your identity that you want to share publicly.

Still need convincing? I just googled "Facebook steals data" and here's the first four results.

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal

Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org
In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising

Facebook Data Breach: What Happened and How to ...

StrongDM
https://www.strongdm.com
Mar 14, 2025 — Cybercriminals accessed personal information belonging to more than half a million Facebook users and published it on a hacking forum.

Facebook Data Breach Fallout—Millions May Receive ...

Forbes
https://www.forbes.com
Nov 18, 2024 — The 2019 breach exposed the personal information of 533 million Facebook users across 157 countries through a technique known as "scraping." ...

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for ...

The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com
Mar 17, 2018 — Cambridge Analytica spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls.

Here's a short list of things to do to start taking ownership of your data.

1. Get a personal domain and Email
2. Find website hosting you can afford

I said it was short.

You need your own personal domain to use as your primary online identity

Hosting:

Web hosting does cost a little but in my experience, it's worth the price. I code my own site and host it on Neocities.org. Neocities does have a free terr, but I pay $5/month for expanded storage and use of my own domain name. Otherwise I'd have go with their subdomain, like www.stevenpreston.neocities.org instead of my actual domain www.stevenpreston.im, I like my domain much better, and I'm proud to share it, plus the extra data storage is nice to!

Full Disclosure: A Website Is A Commitment

professional artist Gwenn Seemel, who left Meta in 2019, explains in her blog post that "...a [web]site can lend your work that professional feel, but with one caveat: it must be maintained regularly. If you don’t know how to upkeep it yourself, the site will look as out-of-date as it is, so it’s a good idea to hold off on building your home on the web until you’re ready for that commitment. That said, compared to all the learning and relearning of FB and IG you have to do every time His Zuckiness decides to make a change, picking up a bit of HTML is really not that complicated."

Personally, I find her story inspirational as I just left Meta this year. My takeaway on this is we can be a successful artists, bloggers, or general internet enthusiasts without corporate-owned social media dominating our online existence.

Building a website from scratch is not for everyone and can be challenging. If the idea of coding freaks you out don't worry, you can still have your own site on something like Wix or other platform that has pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop system for you to add your content. However, when you go that route, the cost is also much higher and has many other negatives such as less control over site design, theme, and structure. But, it's still better than not having your own site!

Owning a website builds authority

Having and using your own domain name and a matching email is important, especially if you use business cards or other printed promotional media, or communicate with clients or potential customers via email. Gmail or Yahoo email services are fine if your not a professional. I always have a tough time taking people seriously who use Gmail for their business communications. My email is my first name at my domain name so it matches my website. Try it out, I'll reply and you can also see my email signature that links back to my website. Don't worry, I wont spam you.

Start With A Simple One-Page-Website

At the very least you should have a one-page website like this that covers the basics of who you are, what you do, and how to contact you. This is the front door to your online identity and it is the first step in owning your data. Also once your website is setup, you will feel more confident and motivated to share your URL instead of just your corporate-owned social media profile.

Publish on your Own Site first, then Syndicate Elsewhere. This practice is called POSSE.

By practicing POSSE, you can have your content published to social media of your choice with a personal permanent link back to the original content on your own site. Thus contributing to your authority. You're allowing those that read your content on those platforms to continue seeing what you have to say all while retaining ownership and control of your content on your own site.

By publishing on your own site in an ad-free environment you get better search engine rankings for your ideas than any ad-packed corporate-owned social media silo.

By POSSEing your post from your site to silos of your choice, you reach those who read primarily inside those silos, in addition to traffic / readers from search engine results.

In total you get more traffic and your ideas reach more brains.

Add info about yourself

Your personal home page should include your basic information.

While you are not yet publishing any content on your own site, the advantages at this point are you're on your way to owning your data and this helps with providing authorship information for anything that you do publish and link back to your home page. These are small but important steps to declaring your independence from corporate-owned echo chambers like FB, Insta, X, Threads, etc.

Additionally by linking from your personal website to your existing social media, then linking your social media profiles to your personal website helps set you up as an authority and establishes your online identity.

1. You've staked your claim on the web
2. Set up an identity that you own and control

Optional Bonus Steps

Move old social media content to your personal website

Give your new website content to share by downloading your data from your old/current social media platforms and repost it on your website in the form of blogs or articles. Once you are posting on your own site and POSSE'ing out the content back to social silos, you now have permalinks back to your website, further building your online identity and authority.

Cheers,
Steven

"Low Tech" Images: ditherit.com was inspired by a 2018 blog post from Low-tech Magazine about how to reduce the energy usage associated with running websites. One method discussed was to reduce full color images to dithered images with very few colors and subsequently smaller file sizes.