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Everything was moving very quickly in 1995 when I launched my first web page. Lycos was the leading search engine, and Google had just started to make a name for itself. Claramail provided a handy tool for the few people who used email addresses. A global competition between a wide variety of geniuses was inventing the web of tomorrow. Personal web pages disappeared, CMS arrived, and here I am writing on PhpBB and ipB forums, on my blog under 2Bevolution, then Joomla! then Wordpress, and now it's 2018. A little off to the side, after ICQ and MSN, MySpace, Twitter was the place to be. There were lots of exchanges and they were quite pleasant. It was a time of excitement, driven by the Arab Spring and the Paris attacks.
Then everything changed.
The forums closed one after the other, and TikTok, Snapchat, and Telegram rose to prominence (in a different order). Slogans gradually replaced long sentences, images replaced words, video clips replaced everything. Twitter became polarized and was bought by a billionaire on ketamine. Then there was the Analytica scandal on Facebook a short time ago. We are gradually discovering that our data enriches only a few people, that privacy is just a facade, and that our talents are being exploited. An ogre is coming: AI. The web, a tremendous hope for sharing for some, is definitively falling into line with capitalism.
In short, I am joining the ranks of those who are closing all their accounts. Nothing matters anymore, only our freedom of choice remains, the choice to no longer participate in this masquerade.
But there is Mastodon, a decentralized haven of peace, undoubtedly disinterested, and still, for me in 2023, a desire to share a few ideas and the need to gather a few thoughts on a mini blog, other than a social network. However, I couldn't find anything that suited me; either it was too expensive or too complex (I was really looking for the simplest possible solution). I ended up creating a mini site in HTML5, but it lacked flexibility.
And then, thanks to Kagi's Small Web, I discovered blogs written using Bear! The solution was right there! In December 2025, thirty years after my first page, I recreated a blog under the name Eghone's Corner.
Welcome, and thank you for reading! π«Ά