I didn't like having an owner of the social media control the permissions of what I post, and controlling moderation. Allowing ai data scraping w/o my permission, and bias in moderation, etc. I used to use tumblr, but then the owner started going nuts and personally harassing a trans woman, which is when I made my website, I think.

I mean, I still have a tumblr and go back to post gifs and interact with people, but I mostly keep to IRL

I kept stumbling on really hateful comments in other sites. As it got more frequent, I drifted away from those because it's just depressing for me to see all that hate. Also, I wanted to get creative somewhere and here I can have both: no nasty comments (or very rare) and plenty of creativity from everyone :D

Still have tumblr for lurking and reblogging artists. But I don't post any original content

my friend recommended it and I hyperfixated a little too hard

I had the idea for my site for years and had tried different ways of implementing it over the course of time (blogs, Tumblr, etc). I discovered Neocities because of a random mention and after a quick browse through other people's sites, it just clicked that the only thing that would allow me to make the project what I want is an "old school" site. So register I did.

I got tired of the lack of personalization and watching social media sites crumble. I decided it was best to have a place for all of my stuff then, that wasn’t subject to being pulled at any second.