There Is No Cloud

It’s just other people’s computers going up in flames.

This blog went up in flames at OVH in 2021. The automatic backup automatically failed to work, and a large chunk of the data was missing.

With Codex, I’ve now managed to recover almost everything from the incomplete backup, other old servers, and the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It should be mostly complete now. Of course, a good number of external links have rotted away in the meantime. Wherever I found more up-to-date links, I’ve updated them.

The blog now runs on a new, lightweight blog engine written in Go, using SQLite behind Caddy. It should be pretty fast, and it’s completely free of WordPress and PHP. And this time, we have proper backups!

I gave self-hosted Mastodon a shot, and I’ll stick with it for the time being, but the people behind it seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure ordinary people don’t accidentally stumble onto the platform or, God forbid, feel comfortable there.

Search? Discovery? Haha, nope. GTFO.

Replying to a post on another server? Following someone you don’t know? Good luck.

Bridging to Bluesky is a complete shitshow. The protocol is as heavyweight as a goddamn mammoth, the software is as bloated as an LLM running on 8× NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, and to top it all off, it’s built on Ruby on Rails (lol, talk about shooting yourself in the foot).

If you absolutely insist on self-hosting this stuff, you might want to try Masto.host. The guy running it does a great job, but the software certainly doesn’t make his life easy.

What was wrong with RSS?

Nothing.

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For now, I’ll cross-post everything to my Mastodon account. Because apparently, just announcing your blog posts via ActivityPub requires an amount of effort that would bring even a seasoned IT veteran to tears.