Updated the alternative platforms blog post (draft)

content/blog/altplatforms.md

@@ -1,16 +1,50 @@
 ---
 title: "Alternative platforms and why you should consider them"
-description: Let's take back our internet from the Silicon Valley overlords!
+description: I'll tell you how to be an internet chad and resist from Elon's and Mark's empires
 thumbnail: "/blog/img/altplatforms.png"
 date: 2022-11-06T20:31:34+01:00
 tags: ["selfhosting", "free software", "bloat"]
 draft: true
 ---
 
-Most people nowadays have a very limited view of the internet: they just watch content like posts, photos and videos from the same 5 or 6 social networks owned by a few corporations who filter the content to make people spend even more time on these sites, making them believe what they want you to believe and bombarding you with ads tailored to every single activity of yours, even on other websites, holding entire monopolies on the tech industry and the flow of information. Instant messaging happens all on either SMS or WhatsApp (more rarely on Telegram and Signal) which have extreme privacy issues, more specifically the first one for being an ancient unencrypted protocol and the second being yet another data honeypot for Meta.
+Most people nowadays have a very limited view of the internet: they just watch content like posts, photos and videos from **the same 5 or 6 social networks owned by a few corporations** who filter the content to make people spend even more time on these sites, making them believe what they want you to believe and bombarding you with ads tailored to every single activity of yours, even on other websites, holding entire monopolies on the tech industry and the flow of information. Instant messaging happens all on either SMS or WhatsApp (more rarely on Telegram and Signal) which have **extreme privacy issues**, more specifically the first one for being an ancient unencrypted protocol and the second being yet another data honeypot for Meta.
 
-But the internet has not always been like this, the good old internet (I'd say from the very early days up to the mid 2000's) was much different: everyone had their own website, all with a unique look and feel, style of content and complete freedom, but even with the rise of the early social networks and video sharing platforms like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, there was so much more soul and uniqueness to what people uploaded on such sites. When it comes to messaging there were several options, such as email, BBS and IRC, which were (and still are) decentralized, interoperable and not under control of one entity, although that's also when early proprietary IM platforms such as AOL, MSN Messenger and Google Talk were created, and all of these protocols and platforms weren't exactly private since back then there was no real concept of online privacy.
+But the internet has not always been like this, the good old internet (I'd say from the very early days up to the mid 2000's) was much different: everyone had **their own website**, all with a unique look and feel, style of content and complete freedom, but even with the rise of the early social networks and video sharing platforms like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, there was so much more soul and uniqueness to what people uploaded on such sites. When it comes to messaging there were several options, such as email, BBS and IRC, which were (and still are) **decentralized, interoperable and not under control of one entity**, although that's also when early proprietary IM platforms such as AOL, MSN Messenger and Google Talk were created, and all of these protocols and platforms weren't exactly private since back then there was no real concept of online privacy.
 
 ![An oldschool site (wac.neocities.org), HexChat and Outlook Express 6](/blog/img/webircemail.png)
 
-Clearly the internet has evolved bringing us lots of interactivity and information, speedier and more accurately than ever, but the drawbacks of the gradual corporate takeover of the web, along with the fact that people nowadays are so illiterate about computing in general that [the youngest ones don't even know what files and folders are](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z), that has happened in the last few decades are enough for me to say that we should stop for a moment and look back at what we've lost, so that we can take those old concepts to rebase, or in some cases even replace, what we dislike about the modern web in order to improve it.
+Clearly the internet has evolved bringing us lots of interactivity and information, speedier and more accurately than ever, but the drawbacks of the **gradual corporate takeover of the web**, along with the fact that people nowadays are so illiterate about computing in general that [the youngest ones don't even know what files and folders are](https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z), that has happened in the last few decades are enough for me to say that we should stop for a moment and **look back at what we've lost**, so that we can take those old concepts to rebase, or in some cases even replace, what we dislike about the modern web in order to improve it.
+
+# Build your own website
+
+Doesn't matter if it's a simple HTML page with a few links and no CSS, or if it's a beautiful piece of web design art, having **your own little place on the internet** is crucial to stay away from the influence of big corporations and have the ability to do whatever you want.
+
+![My website VS motherfuckingwebsite.com](/blog/img/coolvssimplesite.png)
+
+In order to do this we have two questions to answer to.
+
+## How do I make my website?
+
+### Write in bare HTML
+
+This is the most direct way to create a webpage, you just write plain HTML on a blank file and start building from there, even though using a template is also a good way to start learning. This isn't the most convenient way to make a website since you need to learn and use proper HTML syntax and you'd have to write your own CSS if you want to style your site and not make it look like it's literally from the 90's.
+
+![Good old Notepad++ with some HTML source open (image from lifewire.com)](/blog/img/htmlediting.jpg)
+
+### Use a static site generator
+
+This is my preferred way to write a website: you get a template and just write your various pages and articles in Markdown, a very simple to use markup language, so that the software will compile it into a full HTML and CSS site automatically. I use the most popular generator, which is [Hugo](https://gohugo.io). It takes a while to learn and you need to be used to run a few commands from the command line, but once you wrap your head around it you will be able to make flexibly and efficiently a full blown site. You can still learn HTML and CSS with it by editing the template files manually, which is how I customized [the template I used](https://github.com/jonathanjanssens/hugo-casper3) for my website.
+
+![Me writing this very paragraph in Markdown and seeing a live result on the other side](/blog/img/hugoediting.png)
+
+### Use WriteFreely or WordPress
+
+If you want a fancy and intuitive interface to write in, there are Free Software solutions like WriteFreely and WordPress, among others. They're a bit cumbersome to install and are also a little heavy on resources, but the result is a software that lets you write a blog in a very easy and not too distracting way.
+
+![WriteFreely](/blog/img/writefreelyui.png)
+
+## Where do I host my website?
+
+### Selfhosting at home
+
+This is my preferred method since I have lots of old computers that I can repurpose