I wonder if there is a way to combine the weird fun that was geocities/tripod/etc with the connections of a social network and modern ease of updating. Like how you use twitter, but for following webpages about butterflies or a shrine to the 6502 processor.

RSS - (partially) Google killed it.

My first website was about about TNG and why DS9 sucked balls.

Ironic since I now consider DS9 the better series (but TNG still has the truly stand out episodes, I think young me was just oblivious to a lot of the subtler stuff but I digress), it was shockingly bad (and I'd been programming since the 80's, HTML was just weird).

I spent about five years hating the crap out of it and never even considered web development as a career, if you'd have asked me back then I'd have said you'd claw the compiler out of my cold dead hands.

20 odd-years later and I do enterprise web dev (and C#/WPF and Java)

RSS is alive, and for dumb sites there are hacks such as https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/-