There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
I agree with this.
Social media shouldn’t be a requirement to express yourself online. If you start with a website, then you can choose to share on social media if you want, or not, plus anyone who wants to follow the site can subscribe to the feed without needing an account themselves.