I haven’t updated the site in a long time, so I finally decided to do so. I was on paternity leave a few months back and in that time when I wasn’t exhausted or busy with my son I spent the time thinking, reading and doing some exploring.

One of the things that has concerned me a lot in the last couple of years is the rampant censorship that is being pushed. Finally to type this now with Elon purchasing Twitter, maybe things are going in the other direction, but it seems to me that the reason we are in this situation is because of the increasing amount of centralization of services that has occurred under web2. There used to be tons of independent blogs and competing blogging hosts, and you see so much content shift into Medium. RSS readers were huge and you saw Google kill its reader as more content got centralized.

There has been a shift of independent podcasts to Spotify. Facebook and Twitter have centralized user interactions and that is when the deplatforming of people for contrary opinions becomes a huge problem. I am of the mindset the best way to combat bad ideas is with information and maybe mockery for really absurd things, but silencing voices makes some things that would go no where pickup steam.

In the meantime on the tech side Ubuntu released a new LTS candidate and once again my site was out of date. I was seeing some issues on EC2 where it would go down occasionally (just my container, not EC2) and not wanting to rebuild it I would just reboot it when it happened. After seeing AWS deplatform websites I started asking myself is this where I want to host my site and send my money to every month if they are engaging in behavior that I find objectionable. It seems like centralizing virtual servers on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure is also a bad trend. Given that I am not a business that needs the scale of those services (when sometimes there is no other option) it made sense to move my servers to an independent provider.

I figured I would take a look at Digital Ocean and Linode as I had heard great things about both. I tried them out and settled on Linode to start with. I was exploring the Fediverse during my paternity leave and it really seems like the solution to the issues I see with the central services. I tested setting up my own site, and have been happy playing around with it. It worked well on Linode with both IPv4 and IPv6 and I could never get IPv6 working correctly to my EC2 instance.

My mastodon server has run so well for me I finally decided to move this site over this weekend. So as of now I am all the way migrated over here and fully IPv6 compliant. Everything should look the same on the front end, but I am happy to be supporting a more independent internet. My next exploration is going to be to try and integrate Activity Pub into this instance and post messages automatically to Mastodon like I was doing with Twitter in the past.

Now I have decentralized social media with my Mastodon site, I am supporting competition in hosting, and I have been exploring Podcasting 2.0 which has led me down a bunch of other rabbit holes. Exciting times as always in tech.