How much time do you spend on other people's personal websites?

Technology
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Being very new to the personal web, and also new to actually trying to genuinely immerse myself in a community of a hobby I’m entering, I am intensely curious how much time the average personal web citizen spends on other people’s personal sites.

If it’s a large amount, is it a lot of time on a few sites, or a little time spread out skimming lots of sites? How much content do people consume in their RSS feeds? Do they skim dense blog posts or sit down and read it all carefully? Etc.

Of course this will vary person to person, but I find this question interesting because a consequence of the majority of internet socializing and sharing happening over social media, people will consume lots of content, but usually only a small snippet from a single creator before moving on to the next one. A few sentences in a tweet or reddit post, an image on instagram, a video on tiktok/instagram reels/youtube shorts. There are exceptions, tumblr and long form youtube come to mind, but even then posts are usually consumed as singular experiences in a feed.

Coming from that environment, it is strange that one can arrive at a totally unique personal space and have hours worth of miscellaneous works from a single creator, usually carefully packaged in intentional web design. You are faced with a choice of how deep down each rabbit hole you go, and it is entirely self directed. There is no algorithmic recommendation in the corner to pull you further into the rabbit hole, it is simply a question of “do I click on this link? Do I read this? Do I want to engage with this?”

Personally so far, I’ve been looking mostly for visual inspiration so I have been skimming a lot of sites quickly and evaluating if I want to save them for further study later. I will click around if I really like the site or if it’s simple without many pages to explore. I haven’t found any blogs I really want to come back to, much less set up an RSS reader thingy. If I stick around, I hope this will change and I will spend more time with the pieces of expression I find, and find reasons to come back to certain sites again and again.

I have this hope because I hope that a few people will engage* with what I put up. But, maybe the personal web is mostly full of people broadcasting and not as many people receiving or listening to other broadcasts, and maybe that’s okay. Art doesn’t need an audience to be meaningful necessarily. And then again, maybe the personal web is a true give and take experience! What do you think? What’s your experience been?

Edit:
*By engage I don’t mean I’m hoping for traditional social media engagement with comments and likes and other attempts to quantify human response. I just mean that intellectually or emotionally I stir a response in someone, even if it’s small.

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I haven’t broken my habit of taking my phone into the crapper with me, but if I do bring it, I check RSS feeds instead of doomscrolling parasocial media.

Unfortunately, it’s usually the case that when you subscribe to a new RSS feed, you only get a few of that site’s most recent posts

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some! i enjoy surfing around looking for cool sites to bookmark. if there’s a lot of things to look at and i find it all interesting, then i’ll spend some time on a site poking around and bookmark it to come back later.

generally when i’m surfing around webrings and such, though, i’m skimming through a lot of pretty small sites that don’t have a lot to spend time on! or blogs that aren’t super relevant to my interests.

i spend a looooot more time working on and looking at my own web site than looking at other ppl’s, though! it’s the perfect site for me, after all, perfectly catered to my own interests.

~

it can be hard to gauge something like “engagement” or the size of an audience on personal websites, especially ones without comments sections or opportunities to leave small low-effort feedback on every single thing. they’re both much more social and much less social than social media… more social in that if people are going to interact with your site it’s generally in a more high-effort personal one-on-one capacity, but less social in that you don’t have the ambient crowdnoise of likes & reblogs. like, if 100 people see your website and smile and nod and think, “cool site!” then you might get one guestbook comment and not hear much more about it; if 100 people see your tweet and smile and nod and think, “cool tweet!” then you might get 100 likes. yknow? upsides and downsides imo.

people are going to see your web site and think about it, you’re just not going to hear about it! even people who are “neocities famous” are not getting anywhere near the number of comments that someone of similar microcelebrity would on youtube or twitter or whatever.

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I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of bookmarks there are in thousands of people’s browsers that are intended to be returned to, and never are lol. Sometimes I successfully come back to bookmarks and sometimes I don’t, but either way it’s nice to know I’m not alone in squirreling away things to come back to at an ideal time :upside_down_face:

Great points. I should have used a word other than engagement, since that has been commodified and given numbers on social media like you point out. When I say I hope a few people will engage with what I put up, maybe that means a comment section if I can figure out how to implement that, but mostly I just mean it making some sort of impact on the person, whether small like making them smile or genuinely giving them something to think about. Maybe a better way to put it is “I hope a few people spend time with and enjoy or have some other emotional response to what I put up.”

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Depends on what I’m doing that day. Sometimes i skim through webrings and surf from one page to another, clicking on a couple links and mostly just saving cool websites to add to my button wall + look at later. A lot of websites also just don’t have much Stuff on them. Nothing wrong with that at all! But it shortens the literal amount of time I spend on something.

Sometimes I can really sink my teeth in and explore a site; I’m not much of a blogger or blog-reader, so I don’t spend a ton of time in people’s blogs, but if there’s a section for their art, a graphics collection, some sort of game or interactivity, I spend as long there as I can. I also like seeing people’s reactions to other blog posts, articles, or media that I am vaguely interested in.

As an aside… I think sticking in someone’s consciousness, evoking an emotional response of some sort, is more important to me than ensuring visitors look at everything I did. I made my site for me, and I just like knowing when others like it, even if it’s not in a ‘deeper’’ way!

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I don’t spend as much time as I would like, but such is life. The primary way I engage with the personal web is through RSS feeds. I like finding blogs to follow. Not every post will be something I find interesting, but that’s okay. Otherwise I’ll bookmark sites of my friends around here to check in on what they’re up to (kind of as a social media substitute), as well as sites that have a lot to explore (@brisray’s site comes to mind, there are tons of interesting pages!). When I’m in a surfing mood, I like to browse link directories to find new sites and blogs. I don’t care for webrings and button walls as much. As Jay said, a lot of websites don’t have much going on, or simply serve as a profile page. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not something I find interesting, so I kind of quickly pass over those kinds of websites.

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When I first started, I was scrolling through a lot of the top small websites. Then started the recently updated list. But over time I felt like I started seeing the same websites over and over.

So now I occasionally look through some at a time, and when I find things I enjoy I add them to my bookmarks or links list.

As for how long I spend on each site, it depends on the site. I will generally look through the main pages. If they have a blog I will look through the list. And then sometimes will read their backlog posts for a bit.

Something I enjoy about having a website is I don’t have to worry about feedback on every piece. I can focus on creating instead of worrying how it is received. I do still have that a bit on external sites though.

I still have a way for people to contact me, but less people tend to respond when it’s not through a feed. But I appreciate anyone who enjoys my stuff, and I try to share that with other creators too. I want the web to be creative and fun too!

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yes!!! this put into words exactly why I like putting art and stuff on my site rather than social media! This way I don’t feel bad if no one comments or likes my art post, because it never had a comment section to begin with. My gallery is also meant to be more timeless rather than a constantly updated feed anyways.

~~
Anyways Ill answer the actual topic question now:
I mostly find sites through neocities and 32bit cafe. For neocities its the website search or people who follow me. For 32bit cafe its usually via introduction posts here and on discord :3
How much time I spend is based on how big the site is and how interesting I find it. If its a basic blog or a new neocities its not much time.

My go to first pages are an about page, I love those, and am sometimes disapointed when there isn’t one. Ironically, even though I’m not into blogs, if a wider scope site has a blog/journal I’ll look at that too. Gives me an idea of their general disposition and lets me know quicker if someone is a bigot or just unpleasant. I’ll usually read the first couple of posts

I always love finding fellow artists on the personal web so I’ll check out the art gallery if they have one :3 Though I won’t do it on my phone data bc some people haven’t learned to compress their images yet ^^;;; (I am guilty of this too, I need to go through my site and do some compression)

I also don’t have an RSS feed reader or a feed set up for my own site either, because again I’m not as interested in sites that are just blogs.

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I limit mine to the most recent 10 for a few reasons. When I come across this with other feeds, if the posts are good I definitely open up the website and go surfing through their archives looking for more interesting posts!

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I come across this a lot when surfing. There are lots of websites, but lots of small websites with not much on them, I don’t tend to stick around much on those.

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Man, I agree with this SO much. For me it also removes that urge to always be posting things to “keep up with the algorithm.” Social sites always prioritize constant updates, but the stuff on my site is there at the top where I put it. Whenever I feel like updating it, I feel more like I’m adding little bits to a long term project rather than running to keep up with others.

As for me, I think I spend time surfing the small web at least three times a week, depending on my free time. Every few days I get tired of the rat race and start missing surfing around, so I’ll go to my RSS feed and look for updates, click through people’s link pages, or look around on the Fediverse for new folks to check out. Sometimes I’ll keep a tab or two open for the ones that I want to dig through, otherwise I’ll keep on clicking after admiring the smaller sites.

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100% this. When I was cross-posting to social media, I felt like I needed to maintain “momentum” despite repeatedly telling myself that an audience was not an objective. This was incredibly harmful to my headspace on how I approached writing content. I kept feeling like I was “behind” on some arbitrary goal that I had never intentionally signed myself up for. Not having that feeling has been liberating.

On topic, I mostly read personal websites through RSS feeds, but initially I’ll spend some time digging into their archives to see if I want to follow. Depending on how much resonates with me, this could be a few minutes or a few hours of initial time investment.

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