The argument has history.

The one about whether you should own or rent your audience.

Then I noticed a small trend appearing recently in this area: personal websites are starting to replace social media again, for many. When the social platforms arrived, we traded ownership for reach, and now people are slowly taking it back.

I have two main websites. markbowley.com is my profile where I exist online, on my own terms. Then markbowley.me is where I think out loud. Orbiting that I have social accounts, but they don’t do much these days.

That’s the pretty much the whole setup.

None of it is impressive on paper.

No viral growth.

No massive audience.

Just a small, deliberate presence that I own, and that can’t be taken away by an algorithm deciding my content isn’t worth distributing this week.

That’s the trade we made with the platforms. We didn’t just give up ownership. We gave up stability and consistency.

You can spend years building an audience on someone else’s infrastructure, and one policy or feature change can end it.

A personal website or blog doesn’t do that to you.

My blog doesn’t get thousands of readers. My profile doesn’t drive floods of inbound work. But when someone wants to know who I am and what I do? I send them somewhere I control.

There’s no feed pushing other people’s content next to mine. No suggested accounts. No ads. Just what I’ve put there.

That’s what being online on your own terms actually looks like. Not a movement. Not a manifesto. Just a quiet decision to have a corner of the internet that’s yours.

If you don’t have one yet – a personal website, a blog, even just a simple page with your work on it – you might want to think about that.

Not that the platforms are going anywhere, but because inevitably they will continue to drive towards self interest. And that doesn’t give you stability, consistency, or any kind of control.