I Hate What You’ve Done to the Place

Or, towards a brighter future and a shittier motorcycle

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It probably wasn’t last year, or 2021, or 2020, or any particular moment or event. Of course, it never is, really. Because even the “big” events in our lives (and this certainly isn’t about one of those) are made up of the little ones before it. Our trajectories the resultant of a million little vector sums and how we choose to handle them. This blog (and some other things) is one of the ways I am choosing to handle a particular issue: I hate the internet.

Or, at least, I hate what it’s become.

I hate how we’ve taught ourselves to go to one of a handful of sites to find out what’s going on. I hate how we let one app eat a million little IRC rooms. I hate how we gave up making fun, colorful (or simple, or ugly, or just outright confusing), things that we owned. Yes, a lot of it was a bit janky, but that’s okay. Like an old motorcycle that never started on the first kick, or a fan that whined for the first few seconds before the bearings warmed up, we knew the foibles and learned to work around them. A lot of it disappeared, and that’s okay too. Things can be a bit ephemeral. We don’t need every scrap of the past to make it to the future.

Do things work smoother now? Absolutely. The motorcycle starts the first time, every time, and will take you anywhere you want so long as it’s on one of the three approved streets the manufacture owns. The fan is silent and powerful and the only trade off is that you don’t get to pick which way the wind blows. Everything is simple and smooth and immortal and covered in advertisements because, hey, it’s not cheap to funnel one out of every six people on the planet through the same highly polished user experience that makes everyone that uses it kinda miserable.

Despite what I’ve written so far, I’m not doing this to grouse. I’m done with the various misery engines that I’ve let define a significant part of my world for the last decade. I’m here to tinker. I’m here to have fun. Online. Again. And do that, I need to I’m going to need to build myself a slightly shittier motorcycle.

So, wandering through the digital boneyards of Git projects and Python snippets, basket cases of Go and Erlang that just need a bit of work to get up and running, what am I looking for?

• Self hostable – The Y in DIY is important. I’m tired of couch serfing with giant corporations. If I can’t run it myself, I won’t run it.
• Cheap – Both in pricing and in cost of operation. Since I’m paying for the hosting, I’d like to get as much bang for my buck as I can, which means I’m not looking for something that needs an entire box to itself.
• Easy to deploy – I’m not really good at any of this, so I need things that make deployment simple. I want things to happily live in their containers and not require too much attention unless I need to update them.
• Talkative – I would like things to talk to other things, when it would make sense. For example, this is on WordPress rather than a static site generator because it was trivial to give it an ActivityPub actor that can talk to people on the Fediverse and be talked to by them.
• Sharable – Whatever I use, I would like to make available to anyone who wants to join in. That means single user solutions are out, and ease of on-boarding and managing multiple tenants is in.

A lot of this stuff I already have up and running, now the question is if I can keep it going, get some use out of it, and have fun doing so. If not, instead of going back to Twitter and Facebook (I’m too old for the other ones)… I guess I’ll get real into model trains or something.

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