version française de cet article

well not really that homemade.

it’s made with hugo, a static website generator which can manage a post system (that i write somewhere and then build to be hosted somewhere else, yes, even when i want to do simple things, i manage do make them complicated anyway). but it’s not like a wordpress or a substack or anything.

but… why tho?

everything is shit. substack is shit and owned by nazis (or is hosting nazis? can’t keep track of who’s a self-claim nazi or just eating with them), wordpress is bloated, they really did a number on my boy. and i wasn’t really interested to go the full way html+css pages by hand, or make my own blog system old school it would have been annoying (and i HATE frontend development, i never feel more the attraction to vibecoding than when talking about frontend development).

i also spent like 3 or 4 days looking for alternatives to substack, because i was under the delusion that people would be so interested by what i was writing that they would like a newsletter, or even more delusional, want to pay me for it. which is dumb. i’m currently writing a book, and the 3 people i ever sent what i wrote so far (120 pages mind you) never talked about it ever again. so you know, i’m not in any delusion that i’m a good writer. i’m barely considering being a writer at all. i’m like nick miller, i don’t know how to read or write, i just memorized a lot of words.

so since that blog will mostly be something that i’ll use to write longer bluesky posts without having to make threads, hugo and its basics are enough.

and hey, if you still think my words deserve something in return, here’s my ko-fi link. and if one day it really feels like i have to upgrade, i’ll open a ghost blog or something.

no but why a blog in 2026?

i’m gonna start saying words and please stay with me, do not be alarmed : i am NOT a conservative. i am a progressive person, a socialist, an anarcho-syndicalist, i believe strongly that yesterday was worse than what we have today (well, until the fascist drag us down again) and that we have to strive for a better future and a better tomorrow, as detached from the past as possible (not in memory but in acts).

all of this, i believe to my very core, this is my personality, this is who i am as a person, as a woman, as a queerfolk and a trans person.

i believe in progress and modernity, and in changing the world for the better by the way of reform or revolution, i strongly believe in all of that.

except concerning the internet.

i strongly believe, with all my heart, that internet, in our year 2026, is worst that it was before, and that it’s becoming shittier every day. concerning the internet, i am a conservative. i DO believe that internet was “better before” and that “we should go back to the way it was”. i’m not talking about the way we interact on the internet. i’m not talking about discourse on the internet. im not talking about how the internet is leaning politically, i’m talking exclusively about how internet work as a place, as a product, and deep down, as a software.

like, have you noticed? every website, every application, every software, every new game has become worst in quality. bugs are appearing where there were none, features that were always working suddenly stop doing that. your favorite app that was working fine now needs to be rebooted every now and then. every software installed on your computer now eats ram like it’s an open buffet. what they are now lacking in quality they are replacing with fucking ✨ emojis which mean now what a simple piece of code did pretty well, an AI will do worse.

and i am unfortunately old enough to remember periods, very briefs moment in time, when the internet went through phases that were so so much better, and more importantly, way better than the real world. for me the first time was roughly the mid-2000s and it ended with social network and facebook.

a reflection on internet past golden ages (by my standards)

if you weren’t around, you can’t imagine how fun the web was at the time. yeah it was a dangerous place to be as kids but mostly because adults didn’t really understood it and let their children go roam free and do stuff without any precaution, education or supervision (this was basically our 90s/2000s equivalent of letting kids outside until 11pm in the 80s and having to run a PSA to remind the parents to check on them ; “it’s 10pm, do you know where your kids are?”) which is great when you’re a kid in term of freedom, to be able to go and surf the web without your parent watching what you’re doing, but also you could end up being trafficked so that was a tradeoff.

for me that era was forums, MSN messengers, skyblogs (basically the french cultural equivalent of blogger that was centered around skyrock, a french radio dedicated to young people), RPGMaker2k and warcraft III online. what a time to be alive. i would argue that what we have today that is as close as this are maybe discord servers and mastodon instances : that separation of communities by interest is something that i think we had and was working very well at the time, although discord is destroying the open internet by obfuscating information in non-indexable communities but i’m getting sidetracked, this is a subject for a future post (yes i have a bone to pick about discord and discord-like applications).

now, if i want to be totally honest, that web was kinda… bland? do not get me wrong, nothing beats the 2000 post-dotcom bubble websites aesthetic, but who wants a web that’s interesting enough but not interactive enough that it still makes you yearning for the mines nature and grass from time to time. if i had to really point to a sweet spot of community, accessibility, cutting edge stuff and fun (with a dash of problematic things like very edgy humor or straight up every -isms you can think of), that “second golden age” of internet has to be somewhere between 2010 and 2012. facebook was still friend and family (and not bot and shitty interactions with strangers), twitter started to be relevant as the “public town square” but was still very non-algorithmic and so people fought for attention the old fashion way : by shitposting.

when thinking about when that era ended the other day on bluesky, msmeaaaa found an incredible and very fitting explanation : the mayas were right, the world did end on the 21th of december 2012; psy obtained his 1 billions views on gangnam style, the first video to ever reach that level of popularity and bam, gone, there were no more world to conquer, and internet started collapsing on itself by becoming more mediocre every seconds.

and even if i yearn still for the long lost golden ages of the internet, i trully miss this one. i miss the blogs. i miss old twitter when they didn’t tried and it was okay. i miss when internet was still that obscure thing that was creeping more and more on real life, i miss the joke that politicians and journalists really didn’t get twitter and its pretend-influence at the beginning, i miss the less-user friendly interfaces that were somehow easier to use once you got used to it.

and yes, i know, of course i know it’s almost purely nostalgia; i don’t miss old trends, i’m just too old to keep up with the new ones. i miss gangnam style, dumb flashmobs, pranking and harlem shake, but all of this is basically what people are doing with tiktok trends, i’m just too old to use tiktok.

and not all aspects were so perfect either. i know people were shitty, edgy, racists, misogynist, queer and transphobics. we do not miss the redditors of old that ended up being purged, and rightfully so.

but i still miss it. i miss the style, the energy, basically internet as a “place”. it’s like internet ended up being gentrified, and i’m that old tenant that doesn’t recognize her old neighborhood anymore.

so yeah my point is : internet IS becoming worse.

website that were previously fighting for attention by offering services that people would want, are now purely made to trick you. gmail is not longer the best mail, but you’ve been here for so long, why change. google doesn’t work as a search engine anymore, but we’re still using it, because it smother every competition. youtube killed its competitors and now your subscriptions don’t reach you.

all of this has a name, and it’s called enshitification : everything is becoming shittier. and that’s because of monopolies of course, abuse of companies in a dominant position that now does not need to make any effort to retain their consumer base, now they just want to squeeze every bit of personal information from you (which they already have, tenfold, but still need more for some reasons) and everything, every bit of the web is now made to get everything from you, and no more to give you things in exchange from a bit of attention.

yeah, it’s 2026, and i kinda misses the time when the only annoying thing on the internet was targeted ads. i would have loved for it to stay like that.

fight the future, one blog at a time

so what’s my point? well, since we can’t go back in the past, i can, however, make the conscious effort of fighting for the old ways. and one point i think we can start, is by taking back space in the internet. not being hosted somewhere, not being own by an entity, but just a server, a website, a blog, a space you can call your own on the internet. this will not start a revolution, this will not change how things works on the internet today. this will barely be something.

but it will give me a place to write, a place to be, a place to call home.

so yeah, it’s 2026, and i’m opening a blog.

nakou, you’re a french girl. why english?

because i took the habit years ago to communicate mostly in english on the internet. and turns out i have to also work professionally with people all around the world and, believe it or not, english is the most common language we have. the american empire might be crumbling, but the british empire survive in our usage of the shakespearean tongue.

also, disclaimer, i’m using a mix of codium, visual studio code and basic gitlab web editor to write, so the spell and grammar checks might be less than enough, and my dyslexia might not help. but as long as i’m understandable and that i get my point across, we should be good.

finally, some article may be written in french, and they will be done like that because i will have probably something very french to share, probably about french politics, and i’ll have the goal to share my thoughts with as many french people as i can, and my country is very bad at reading english like… i’m watching all my movies in their original languages and i’m getting shitted on i swear to god. dubbing is a religion here.

aight, im somewhat satisfied by those really elongated explainations of questions nobody really asked

good! then, welcome to my blog. it’s 2026, but we’re partying like it’s 2004 babyyyyyy.