What if I want to make my own fun, colorful website with javascript games and pixel art and stuffs but I'm not a 16-year-old therian endogenic system from Germany/Canada with fandom autism? Not to seem out of touch or anything, but it feels weird and tragically ironic that the indie web, a community that's supposed to be focused on free-form self-expression without the boundaries of modern social media, centers one very specific creative archetype that thrives on rigid structure and constructing one's identity out of hundreds of discrete objects, interests, and labels that seem optimized for audience/algorithmic legibility. Nearly every personal site in this scene genuinely feels like it could have been made by the same person, with almost all of them seeming to follow a basic script that optimizes for a performative approximation of individuality through conspicuous consumption; nothing on the billion or so 'shrine' pages explicitly named as such do anything to establish the creator's uniqueness beyond signalling their devotion to a particular media property. Is true individualism on the internet dead, and are we all just reflections of the things we consume through our screens nowadays?

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