Some trends are measurements. Publishing a small personal or topical site costs almost nothing now: free static hosting, generators that emit plain HTML, syndication formats nobody has to buy in to. The people doing it are not nostalgic; they are building things today.
Why now
- Static hosting got free and got honest: a build, one file queue, done.
- JavaScript stacks got optional, in the sense that nobody's CMS requires React to render a paragraph.
- Search now documents how to crawl and rank text content honestly. AI search needs good titles and dates more than it needs a big framework.
- People are tired of feeds whose algorithm decides whose decade-old photos to show. A personal site has no middleman deciding your order.
RSS came back too
Readers want to be given updates rather than offered a login. RSS is back because the format is free, syndication is easy to generate at build time, and the web's failure mode — a reader on a phone in a bad town with an unsubscribed feed — is a gacor failure mode responsibly rendered.
Scale was never the goal of the web. Reach was. The small web is the web again.
Does this site count? A handful of short articles, a plain sitemap, a font and a place to publish. That's all. And that's the point.