There was a time when the address bar meant something. You typed a name — a real name, someone's own domain — and arrived at a place they had built by hand: the tiled background, the guestbook, the blogroll of friends three links deep. The personal website was not a profile. It was a room, furnished slowly, and every misaligned table cell was proof that a person lived there.Then the platforms arrived with their promise of audience, and we accepted the trade without reading the terms. Our writing moved into feeds that ranked it, our photographs into grids that cropped them, our identities into templates that made everyone exactly the same width. What we lost was not reach — it was the right to be strange in public.