This is an experimental blog (for now) to write some small articles on the web and fediverse, directly from Emacs/org-mode. I alredy tried with org-mode and Hugo but I'm not much satisfied by the result. Since I'm currently experimenting with the Fediverse I decide to try WriteFreely and Nostr not that convinced by both for some reasons but still interested to reach an usable modern classic web, meaning easy to use/update personal websites, personally served, mirrored by those who want automatically, with RSS for those who simply want to get the mere text, which is the only real point, as much as personal and without hassles as possible.

rationale for a blog

Well... Almost all of us have something to say, and the internet, the web, are enormous agoras where every message gets lost in the crowd. LLMs help find scraps of information you're looking for, just like classic keyword-based search engines do. RSS helps us follow who we want by creating our own personal aggregator, a limited and modern version of Emacs/Gnus for Usenet, meaning all posts are gathered with personal scoring to organize them instead of a third-party recommendation engine with potential biases according to those third parties' wishes. The essence is the textual message, with possible binary content (images, videos); the tool is how to deliver it depending solely on our own will, without third-party censors banning at their will, without recommendation engines hiding content displeasing to their owner, without dependence on a specific third party. Of course, for DNS, for having a connection, we still depend on third parties, but not specific ones; they are various and we can choose, without that implying any action from those who follow us. The concept is similar to porting a phone number between various operators; there's still a form of “slavery,” but I can change operators and whoever calls me doesn't have to do anything special when that happens; the number, like the blog, remains the same.

rationale for WriteFreely

The blog remains fragile nonetheless: it's a central point where someone publishes, then can delete, disappear etc. The Fediverse helps because it allows those who participate as readers to automatically have others' messages on their own server, to have them updated, but also archived and usable when needed, locally on personal iron. To this day, it's a plethora of different software, quite cumbersome. WriteFreely seems the least cumbersome to me; they are largely suboptimal for my tastes because unfortunately they lack the big picture: recreating Usenet with modern aesthetics for today's users and added modern medias¹ something that unfortunately is alien also to many modern programmers.

That's is, let the experiment begin!

notes

¹ photos, videos in better shape than being base64-encoded in binary groups