Tag: <span>federated</span>
Wednesday 19 August 2026
9.39pm
I really thought that I had found a viable home. A place where I could write to my hearts content and maybe actually have it viewed by someone.
The #smallweb is a wonderful thing. But is, at times, it’s like space: cold and lonely. I thought federating my blogs would find life in the universe that is the web.
I was wrong.
All I have found is snobs. #Gatekeepers who, if it doesn’t meet their narrow-minded standards, belittle, admonish, and even suspend accounts for things they don’t see “fit.” I cry bullshit!
I have another blog that I maintain that has articles about tech, computers, the independent web, old and alternative technology, and the ways technology shapes how we communicate, create, work, and live. I have written a few so far and have some already written that I am spacing out so I don’t flood with posts. I use AI generated images for my posts. Why? Because I have a full-time job, I’m in graduate school earning my MA in American History, I play in multiple bands throughout the week… spending time searching for a public-domain, free-use, RELEVANT image for my posts is something I don’t spend time on. AI generates a useful image to get the point across – that’s all that is needed.
But no… one of those snobby, federated gatekeepers decided my posts were ALL AI and they suspended my account. No message. No “we’ve had multiple reports of blah, blah, blah,” just me happening to view my content details and seeing it suspended. A few emails, and Mastodon got me back… but not without damage done.
I now have to prove every single point of my online existence along with just trying to say what I want to say. Fuck that.
The small-web (#gemini capsules, phlogs, etc) are wonderful things. They just fall into the cracks most of the time. But, I can write about what I want to write and how I want to write.
Maybe that is more important than a federated gatekeeper, who doesn’t know me from Adam, judging me.
Sunday 16 August 2026
7.38am
Offgrid Holdout has gone through quite a few iterations trying to find a place for it. It originally was a SSH BBS, then a small web site, then a pubnix.
Now, I’ve taken it back to something simple and manageable. It’s running a very bare bones WordPress with a totally custom designed theme. All the unnecessary fluff in WP has been taken out and things tightened down. The theme wraps everything nicely and plugins are (right now) less than 5 (one is a custom designed plugin to display my self-hosted Navidrome music).
I also have moved closer to federated connections as opposed to the small web. I still maintain a small web presence and believe in it, but federation fits me better int he nice gray area between the modern web and the small web.
Another reason for the change is I wanted to decommission the VPS that Offgrid Holdout was running on. Moving to one of my VPS that hosts other websites allowed me to do that and save some money in the process.
While I was doing that I decided that I had a computer running services on a local server that I could easily migrate to another local server, so I spent the day yesterday moving those services, tightening up the server they moved to, and updating my infrastructure documentation. In three years of just having my daily desktop I have a lot more services on 3 local servers running that back then. Sprawl and keeping things tracked and documented takes more time than you would expect.
I’m really going to try and stay on track with this blog. I think I will.
Tuesday 2 June 2026
4.03pm
Convince me I am wrong: “The Fediverse proved millions will leave commercial platforms when given a reason. But Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, and the rest mostly recreated the same social architecture people wanted to escape: timelines, follower counts, virality, engagement loops… just federated. The migration was sociological, not architectural. People wanted out, but what they got was ‘Twitter, but federated,’ not a fundamentally different shape of online life.”
