The Folkmoss Logs

mobiles, pcs and privilege (or, make your site mobile-friendly)

Edit: there you go.

Okay. I'm gonna say something controversial yet brave: if you don't want to come off as a smug, privileged kid, make your website mobile-friendly.

I say this earnestly. I know I'm brand new to this game (last October was the first time I looked at css/html since 2017), but having read a lot about the "old web/indie web" and visited so many personal websites I can say that not making your site mobile-friendly is sort of a dick move.

Story time: I live in Northeast Brazil. Most people here can't speak English, and I ended up in this funny role of English tutoring. And that's a game I'm not new to. I've been an English tutor for well over 15 years now and have taught all sorts of public. From that experience, I can tell you this much: a LOT of people skipped the bulky 1990s-2000s PCs and went straight to mobile phones. Why? Because that's all they could ever afford. That's the thing about the evil smartphones: it made internet accessible to a lot of people who otherwise would still be cut off from it.

Nowadays, most people I know don't own computers. Most kids who want to work in tech don't own computers. Most students don't own computers. I've taught plenty of college kids who only have access to a computer via internships in tech companies or government programs. And if they leave the internship, they lose that computer privilege. But do you know what they own for sure? That's right, a smartphone. Maybe that's not the norm in other countries, but it sure is where I live.

Can't read Portuguese? Let me translate it for you:

The majority of Brazilian Internet users (62%) access the internet exclusively through mobile phones, a reality for more than 92 million individuals. The conclusion [...] reveals that the use of the Internet only by mobile phone is larger among women (64%), black (63%) and brown (67%) people, and among those belonging to lower classes (84%)."

And I don't think that's only here. When I see self-proclaimed "anticapitalists" talking about leaving traditional social media behind and interacting exclusively via a personal website's cbox/guestbook and e-mail (which is something I've seen mentioned plenty of times in ppl's bios), it's so... disheartening. It feels very capitalistic to "solve" a problem just for yourself. And with that I don't mean to say everyone should be a warrior of social justice, but... why the smug proud in alienating people from accessing your webpage via a smartphone?

I'm not saying your personal website is going to change someone's life forever and improve their quality of life and drag them out of poverty. But why are people making a conscious effort to alienate others from their space? The most affected by this decision are people who, for the most part, are one way or another already alienated from so many other things.

There's room for everything, of course -- online projects and experimentations with format, storytelling, hyperlinks etc that maybe don't really work in mobile. But quite honestly, those are the exception, not the rule. Most of the personal websites I see are just plain text, pics, tables... nothing experimental about them. So why is it so bad to make them mobile-friendly? Is it just a nostalgia thing? Whatever the reason is... Is it worth it?

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post on status.cafe but it got a little out of hand. I could honestly talk even more about this--about writing websites in languages other than English, for example (the reason why most of my personal site is mostly in Portuguese; verdemusgo elaborates very well on the importance of that here) but I digress. Don't know a lot about css/html? Well, do what I did and get a mobile-friendly template. My point is, it's not hard.

I'll be really interested in hearing other ppl's take on this, feel free to hit me up via email, bluesky, cbox or my guestbook.

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