Every few years someone writes an essay about how the personal web is dying or dead. These essays have been written consistently since approximately 2005. The personal web is still here. What changes is who's doing it and why.
The current wave of personal site building is different from previous ones in a few ways. The technical bar is lower than it's ever been — you can now build a personal site without knowing HTML by using tools like Eleventy with a good theme, or Bear Blog, or a dozen other lightweight publishing platforms that prioritize speed and simplicity over features. This has opened up the format to people who wouldn't have attempted it five years ago.
What's driving it
The proximate cause is platform exhaustion. Twitter's deterioration accelerated a conversation that was already happening about what it means to publish on platforms you don't control. People who had been building audiences on social media for years watched those audiences become effectively inaccessible as algorithms changed and platforms declined. The personal site started looking less like a nostalgic choice and more like a practical one.
But the more interesting drivers are cultural. The IndieWeb movement — a loosely organized community that has been building decentralized web infrastructure for over a decade — finally has tools that are usable by non-specialists. Webmentions, which let personal sites interact with each other in ways that loosely resemble social media replies, now work reliably enough to build real community around. ActivityPub integration means some personal sites now participate in the Fediverse, bridging the indie web and the decentralized social web.
What to look at
Neocities is the most visible corner of this: a hosting platform explicitly modeled on Geocities that hosts over 700,000 personal sites, many of them deliberately weird and hand-coded. The community there is young, creative, and aggressively uninterested in SEO. The personal sites on Neocities look like nothing else on the web right now, which is exactly the point.
The other place to look is the broader blogosphere that never stopped existing, now increasingly connected through IndieWeb infrastructure and RSS. The quality of writing in this space, measured by thought per word, is considerably higher than anything algorithmically surfaced.