Arokk

“We plan, God laughs.” -Yiddish proverb

Prior to now, I had a sparsely-maintained self-hosted WordPress blog that used the Activitypub plugin to federate it. It wasn’t anything spectacular, and it certainly wasn’t regularly updated, but it was my little space to post thoughts and nonsense when I felt the motivation, and it served as my Fediverse profile, for a time.

I had recently put forth a challenge to myself to post more regularly and to get back into writing in general after years of creative atrophy. As the Universe is wont to do, it put forth some rather annoying defenses against my attempt to upset my little bubble of homeostasis.

First off, Matt Mullenweg joined the tech bro train of Trumpsucking idiocy that we’ve seen from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, et al. I left Facebook, Instagram, etc. to get away from that kind of lunacy, and I damned sure am not going to continue supporting someone who reveals themselves to be in support of such an eldritch abomination as Mango Mussolini, so I exported my posts and content and deleted WordPress from my hosting account.

The fact that Mullenweg is unhinged isn’t news to me. I am aware of his tantrums and Quixotic ridiculousness that surface from time to time, but that is him running his mouth or griping/suing another company, etc. Now, he’s thumping his chest that an even more unhinged wannabe dictator is using his app to spout his grandiose, megalomaniacal, hateful trash. He’s proud that his company’s work is being used to “serve” the Tangerine Tyrant. I know my support doesn’t matter one bit to someone like Mullenweg, but it matters to me. Good riddance.

I have since moved my blogging “presence” (for what it’s worth) to write.as, as it’s part of the Fediverse, and it’s dead simple to use, and once I figure out a way to self-host in a cost-effective manner (I don’t have a spare computer lying around for setting up my own server, and I have too much non-blogging stuff I use my current shared hosting provider for to switch to another host altogether, although I am using a paid account here just to support the project), I will be moving to a self-hosted Writefreely instance. Maybe. I might just stick to write.as going forward.

So far, I like what I see. The interface is ridiculously simple. You just sign in and start typing. There are no distractions and no miniscule settings to mess with. Having ADHD, the minimalistic interface is extremely helpful. For example: after typing the last sentence, I found myself clicking around on the text editor options for a couple minutes to see if I missed some feature rather than continuing with this post. The visual noise in the WordPress new post interface/block editor was my undoing on multiple occasions, and I honestly don’t miss that at all.

Of course, with simplicity comes a list of nice-to-haves, but I can live without most of them. I don’t need a bunch of customization options, but I would like a full-fledged profile or full integration with my already-existing Mastodon account. There may be ways to deal with this, but I’m just getting started, so I haven’t come across them yet.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the next block the Universe put in front of me and my attempts to upset my personal status quo. For now, I will bid you all adieu.