preamble

i started writing in my own little corner of the internet in 2006. windows live spaces, if you remember that. then i jumped on the hosted wordpress train with two blogs, one for myself, and another specifically around my obsession with the nokia n82. in 2012, i self-hosted wordpress and migrated all my already published posts into one place.

two years later, i tried out ghost. for someone who values simplicity, wordpress felt like an insane heavy-lift for my use case. i read john o’nolan’s post introducing the idea that would become ghost and it resonated with me. professionally, i had started dabbling in nodejs so the fact that ghost was based on node and i didn’t care for php was encouraging. the romance was brief though. i moved to svbtle in 2016 in a bid to stop fiddling with infrastructure and just write. its simplicity and overall ethos were a godsend.

svbtle served me well for almost 10 years, then the compromises started to matter. its handling of images left a lot to be desired, its markdown support was beginning to show its limits, and the frequent downtimes didn’t help. the forever promise only matters if your writing is guaranteed to be up, and you can request an export at any time. a self-hosted ghost setup was beginning to look attractive again.

a similar arc was playing out at scale. we went from owning our own spaces on the internet to handing everything over to platforms for convenience. for the most part, this made sense. as billions have come online, it is difficult to imagine how this could have played out differently. over time, we have experienced waves of romanticized decentralization that have amounted to very little, and are now in an era where centralization has become more insidious than ever. what we put on the internet has been harvested to train models owned by a handful of companies without a meaningful framework for consent and attribution. the very concept of digital sovereignty is at stake.

figuring out how to address this for myself is a quiet obsession. i’ve come to own my compute and storage infrastructure, and i am gradually reclaiming ownership of as much of my digital life as is practical. i’m back on ghost, and this time, it’s not running on a public cloud. the equivalent of google analytics for this blog is also self-hosted, and you can view the metrics here.

when i’m not writing or tinkering with software and infrastructure, i take photographs. i live with five cats who run a tight ship in my absence and graciously let me back into the rotation when i’m home.

this blog has existed in some form for about two decades. it is where i think out loud about technology, identity, society, and whatever else i can’t stop turning over in my head. sometimes it’s a meditation on how we relate to the tools we build. other times it’s me documenting something i’ve done, with earned enthusiasm. some of it is composed and structured. some of it is written as i’m still processing, and published as soon as the core argument is formed. it’s whatever is on my mind, whenever i get around to it. literally, shit ezra says.