Writing to myself
The Why
A few days ago I saw that @shanselman@hachyderm.io was telling people again how we should own our writings, our spaces and what we have to say; that we should not leave all that to a third party whose interest in us is that of a giant looking at the golden eggs his geese are laying. We are the geese, the eggs are “the content” and our hands, well, no need to go any further. Suffice to say, that our hands are tired and we don't get to see any golden ducklings running around. Ok, this metaphor is as subtle as a brick, but I suppose it got the point through.
What really struck me about it, was the blog post he linked to in his toot, dating from more than 10 years ago. And how sad was it to see how pertinent these words are still today, more than a decade later. I also remembered being there, at the time, reading his words and thinking how much did blogs taught me about the profession I picked up a few years further down the line and saddened to see them disappear and giving way to something that gave way to a medium where communication was stripped off of its ability and necessity to be thorough, pensive, demanding- something you had to approach with patience. And I'm thinking now, looking at where the world was back then and we are today, maybe it was just another sign of the times and nothing more.
And I was also thinking about the difference in the way I see today his words of 2012 and how I saw them back then; back then I understood it as a take on how communication changes when the medium changes. Today, it's all about making ourselves the rightful and sole owners of our words. I believe Scott had this in mind ever since day one, and it took me some years to catch up with his initial intent.
Regardless, here I am, today, opening a blog I host on my own; writing to myself not so I could make my voice heard out there, but mainly so I can give it a rest and stop thinking about what would I write about if I had a blog and letting these thoughts out. My guess is that there won't be much to read here. And if there will be, it'll probably be about what I do for a living- again just so I won't have to think about it too much. Once it's published, I can free up some memory (lousy pun intended- if it can be called a pun). I would have preferred writing about other things, but I feel I have even less to say about anything else.
The How
There isn't much to say here, but I felt obliged to write about it- mainly because there isn't much.
I used yunohost on an old laptop I had at home that I was about to throw away. The experience was absolutely mind blowing. Things simply work. As silly as it may sound. I suggest you to head over and look at what it has to offer- but in a nutshell, you flash a bootable device to install a ready made debian server that has a web server, an email server and an XMPP one too. They all work. You will probably need to take care of things like reverse DNS, Port redirection and static IP address, but there's a good chance some of these things you won't need to worry about (if you don't need the email for example). If you are using a VPN provider, you might even be able to have everything working with even less work, but to be honest, that was very little as it was.
Setting up the let's encrypt certificates was a click of a button- and again, it just works. And have a look at all the different applications they have to offer; installing them cannot be any simpler.
I should also thank @nev@bananachips.club – who brought yunohost to my attention and made me consider installing it in the first place. As I told him already- the only thing that is left is letting time do its thing and see if the solution manages to stand the most difficult test of them all.