Why a website at all?

Nobody ever really needs a personal website. It’s a vanity project, like an elaborate tattoo, or a toaster that can handle four slices simultaneously. These are things garish and uncouth. They insist upon themselves. So why am I creating one?

It’d be cool to get into the habit of regularly writing and publishing short-form prose for other people to enjoy. The websites that have brought me the most joy over the years have been weird little blogs and webcomics written as passion projects by people with essentially zero profit motive, and I want to be that for someone else.
Seems like it’d be useful to practice running and maintaining a website in my free time. At the moment, it is an HTML / CSS jekyll site, hosted by github pages. As I think of more fun uses for it, I suspect the tech stack may change. Ideally, the long-term goal is to overengineer a cumbersome and unwieldy albatross that is unmaintainable but which I maintain out of inertia, or a misplaced sense of duty, or just because I have nothing else going on in my personal life. The KPI here is “when I die, will the sheer volume of time I sank into this project be one of my life’s greatest regrets?”. If the answer is “yes”, I’m on the right track.
The internet was a better place before advertising-based social media. The distributed, ad-hoc nature of blogs without tracking, analytics, or skinner-box incentives was charming. Where it still exists, it remains charming.