New Year (almost), New Stack

The recent Twitter … happenings … have gotten me thinking about my relationshp with the web.

I used to very much own my own presence. I’ve had this domain up and running since at least 19991. I’ve had the same email address that whole time - and my spam folder really shows it. I used to write a lot, and I used to post a lot more, multiple times a day, using my hand-crafted blog script that generated a static site w/ updated indexes and pagination every time I ran it. I actually really like the way each day accumluated entries - was I microblogging before it was cool?

The web has changed, and we’ve all moved to social media and silos and keeping our stuff isolated. I’ve been on Twitter since it started basically, and I loved it. But now I’m realizing that I miss having control over what I write and what I read and where my friends are.

So, like I’ve done many times before, I am trying out hosting my own stuff again. Mostly. I am tired of being a Linux sysadmin, so I’m using someone else’s DNS and Github pages. I moved my email to Fastmail and suddenly spam is manageable. I’m using Mastodon some, but I’m also looking at ways I can write short posts on something I own, and then push them to Fediverse and Twitter and Tumblr and Discord.

(I also retroactively added posts for the 4 cats we lost this year, since those felt like really important things I didn’t want locked on Facebook. I may try and bring more of those over if I think about it.)

Here’s to owning our own stuff.

  1. WHOIS says Creation Date: 1998-05-07T04:00:00.00Z but I don’t think I had much there until I started blogging.