Steady Gaze's blog

Writing to write

2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

So it’s been awhile, eh? I feel a bit of nostalgia at that familiar feeling of staring at a blank page/screen.

I’m kind of not happy about my writing skills atrophying after finishing school. My main writing consists of commenting in quests (d20 Pony, Esquestria), which I wouldn’t necessarily consider a path to rhetorical greatness. And that feeling of knowing there’s a word you want but not being able to recall it? Ugh.

So here I am. Priming the pump. Oiling the press. Clearing my metaphorical throat. Writing to write, to get back in practice. Part of this process is that I have to accept that it won’t be the most stimulating thing to read. I mean, great works of writing are a combination of what’s being said, and how it’s said. I think my workmanship is acceptable, but my message is “I really need to get writing again”, which can only be so compelling. Actually, let me try…

This is the way
for the long dead to speak,
for the yet unborn to hear,
for the living to touch immortality.

Words part from space and time.
There are many like it,
but these are mine.

Aren’t I pithy? 😁

There is a “write 100 posts in a year” challenge (100 Days To Offload), but I’m not yet certain if I’ll be able to build enough of a writing habit to not fail miserably after my post declaring that I’ve started the challenge. I’ll take things one step at a time for now.

Questing on the Web

2023-10-07T00:00:00Z

In this post, I sic my urge to classify things on a particular genre of frequently multimodal literature, a form of interactive fiction born out of the Internet: the quest.

My journey

One day in August 2022 while idly scrolling, I came across an extremely pretty pixel art of Moondancer (the character from My Little Pony). To my surprise, there was an entire story in the description, and as I visited the source (d20 Pony), the premise immediately became clear: it was a roleplaying game where players post what they want the collective player character to do, and from this the gamemaster decides what action is taken in the next update. As a My Little Pony (MLP) fanfiction enthusiast, I was immediately hooked and spent the next three days binging the 800 or so updates that had accumulated from 2015 through 2022. When I had caught up, I began participating myself, posting my own suggestions for what “we” should do.^[1]

Later, I stumbled across a Discord server dedicated to such stories specifically in the My Little Pony fandom, and then to questden.org and the now defunct anonpone.com, which made me realize there was a whole world out there for such stories. In some circles, they are referred to as quests, with the “gamemaster” (GM) being referred to as the “questmaster” (QM).

Features

Let’s describe the genre more precisely. I would consider the following features to be essential.

The story branches are not preset (as in a typical videogame story or Choose Your Own Adventure novel), but generated by the questmaster as needed.
Actions are decided on (and often, though not necessarily submitted or suggested) by players.

I would consider the following features to not be strictly essential, but they hold for almost all works in the genre.

In addition to the core principle that players decide what action is taken, there are some commonalities in how collective decision-making works.
- Either freeform choices (commonly known as “commands”^[2] from the “commands” in interactive fiction/text adventure games), or choices suggested by the QM (whose flexibility or openness to other options can vary).
- Commands are submitted asynchronously. A QM posts and waits a certain time for commands. Players don’t have to all be online in chat, in a conference call, or at a physical table at the same time.
- Necessarily, there is some method of deciding what command occurs. If one command is to be chosen, common methods are random selection, “clustering” (the QM groups commands together, and chooses the group with the largest number of commands), or voting (when a QM provides preset options and tallies the votes for each option). A QM may even choose their favorite command, regardless of popularity.
- Instead of choosing one command, a QM may choose to include suggestions from other commands besides the one chosen, or execute multiple commands that aren’t incompatible. Nevertheless, there still needs to be a way to decide between incompatible actions.
- Other players’ suggestions are usually visible to all so that players can build on each others ideas, with the notable exception of games run via asks on Tumblr.
- Acting as the “author”, final interpretation of the command/action taken (and of course, the events that transpire) is up to the QM when writing the next update. (This is unlike some other similar concepts where players directly write parts of the story.)
One main, shared storyline instead of separate texts generated individually for each player based on their own inputs (as in a text adventure). A quest with branching storylines may be possible, but I haven’t seen any extensive branching/alternate timelines besides the short “bad end” branches in Moonstuck (example) as that would be a lot of work, and there aren’t good tools for this.
Story conveyed primarily through text (or text in an image). Most have artwork, but it’s not strictly required. As with other forms of web fiction, it is possible to include multimedia experiences such as linking music to listen to while reading or embedding simple games in Adobe Flash or more modern web technologies.
Relatively lightweight (rules-lite) systems or mechanics, if any. Because of the asynchronous nature of games, a system designed for tabletop roleplay like DnD or Fate would not be suitable due to the frequent need for live feedback from players. Since games are enjoyed more as literature (in the theater of the mind) than as a game with mechanics, they are not really required. d20 Pony has a written, lightweight system, but many quests don’t have any at all.
Usually the players and the audience are equivalent. In other words, anyone who can access the text can also suggest actions. This isn’t strictly required; one could host a private game with most of these features, or have a few handpicked players while everyone else watches, though I’m not aware of any examples.
The content/game logs are public. My impression is that this is usually the case, but naturally, due to selection bias, I have no knowledge of how frequently people play games that fit this definition privately in Discord or Google Docs.
There is usually one player character period, or at least one player character at a time. There may be companions of this character (a “party” in the TTRPG sense) that are loyal and can be asked to do things, but the POV is usually on this one player character. However, this isn’t a hard requirement. Problem Sleuth and other MS Paint Adventures by Andrew Hussie (who also authored Homestuck) contain multiple player characters, with perspective switching between them, and occasionally acting simultaneously.

The following features are common points of differentiation.

Roleplaying may or may not be encouraged/required. The strictness of this requirement depends on the game and the QM. For example, d20 Pony’s rules ask players not to metagame.^[3] However, sometimes, as in Tumblr ask blogs, players are talking to the character rather than submitting actions as the character.
There may or may not be an in-universe justification for the source of the commands.
- Some examples of in-universe justifications are that the player character has “multiple personality disorder” or was injected with an idea-generating AI, etc.)
- It can simply be taken as part of suspension of disbelief or the conventions of the genre. If so, commands are often rationalized post hoc as based on the character’s own motivations. In d20 Pony, the player character’s personality (and instinctive/uncommanded actions decided by the QM) are decided by these justifications. For example, if the players have the character flirt a lot, the QM will start writing them as a flirt.
Varying update length and frequency. There is a tradeoff: with short commands, players are incentivized to submit more granular actions and receive more granular updates at the cost of more work for the QM, while with long commands, players are incentivized to submit more detailed updates and may feel less inclined to “waste” a week trying something out. Quests hosted on 4chan frequently update multiple times a day in bursts while the questmaster is online. d20 Pony, initially hosted on Tumblr before transitioning to a self-hosted website, had short (25-200 word), daily updates, but then transitioned to longer (400-500 word) weekly updates, resulting in a somewhat different pacing/feel.
Varying frequency of consultation. Varying amounts of in-universe time pass between prompting the player for actions, and the players’ character enjoys a varying degree of autonomy. This naturally happens in the case of long, infrequent updates. For example, quests that lean more literary may only consult players at key moments in the story (for example, see The Equestrian Equation), with the “player” character actually being fairly autonomous, and the players aren’t really asked to roleplay as the character.

History

According to the interactive comics TVTropes page, Ruby Quest and other quests on /tg/ on 4chan, then MS Paint Adventures, are the examples that popularized and defined the genre genre. Ruby Quest is likely where the term “quest” originated. There is a very good article on the history of questing here, specifically on how it initially took inspiration from text adventures.

Naming

The genre doesn’t seem to have a commonly accepted and universally used name. Here are some potential names I’ve seen or thought of.

Quests

The term “quest”, while rather generic, is used by 4chan and 4chan clones like Questden. Alternatively, “audience-participation quests” could be equally descriptive, in cases where there isn’t a distinction between the players and the audience.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The term “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) is a natural one that was used by anonpone and the aforementioned Discord server. However, the term isn’t really suitable for a couple reasons: (1) it’s heavily overloaded to describe various similar-but-not-the-same things, and (2) there are legal issues with using it.

I have observed the term CYOA used to describe the following forms of interactive fiction.

Novels/books in print form with preset, prewritten choices and outcomes. Wikipedia says the generic term is “gamebook”.
Text adventures/interactive fiction in game form, like Zork, also with preset choices and outcomes, but even more varied output than a book.
Visual novels, again with preset choices and outcomes.
Food-for-thought would-you-rather posts that imitate a videogame or RPG setup process, mainly on /r/makeyourchoice.
The genre described in this article.

As for legal issues with its use, the term is a trademark owned by Chooseco LLC, which has taken legal action to defend it. For example, some game devs on itch.io had their games suspended after the company issues takedown notices,^[4]^[5] and it sued Netflix for using the term.^[6] A questmaster using it to describe or advertise their work risks such adverse outcomes.

Interactive comics

The closest page for the genre on TVTropes is “Interactive Comic”. I don’t think this is the best term, because I’ve seen the term “quest” used far more often, and because “comic” isn’t an accurate descriptor for most quests. There are quests that don’t have very much emphasis on the art, and most of the time, the text, and even all or part of the dialogue, is not drawn into the art like a comic.

Play by post

Another term is “play by post”. However, this is also an umbrella term and can refer to other phenomena.

Play-by-chat, like when a GM organizes a conventional game of DnD but over Discord, or multi-user dungeons, or if one individual plays one character and another individual plays another, without there really being a gamemaster.
Play-by-email, where the gamemaster individually and privately emails all players potentially distinct updates.

Other names

I considered other terms as well, but they are not nearly as popular as the term “quest”.

“Thread games” after /r/ThreadGames (example).
“Gamefiction”, which I made up, derived from the term “gamebook”.

Platforms

There are various platforms that a quest can be hosted on. A common thread is that either the platform isn’t dedicated to questing, or the software powering the website is repurposed.

4chan and 4chan clones

In addition to entire works of fiction, quests can appear on 4chan itself, for example on the /tg/ (tabletop gaming) board before they were banned; I have also seen quests appear on the /mlp/ board. There are also 4chan clones such as Questden and anonpone dedicated to quests.

On 4chan, every comment in a thread boosts the thread to the top of the board, perhaps resulting in the format being artificially more popular than other types of threads.

Tumblr

Tumblr has a long-running, related tradition of so-called “ask blogs” in which the “ask box” is used to send “asks” that can then be replied to by the blog owner, who can play a character (for example, askthecmcs and twi-replies). This is different from a typical conception of a “quest” as commenters aren’t roleplaying as the character/persona in the blog, but instead talking to the character. If there ends up being a real story, and commenters offer suggestions that the character follows, then it could be considered a sort of quest. There is at least one example of a more traditional roleplay quest in d20 Pony, before it migrated to its own site.

AO3 and other fanfiction websites

It’s possible to host a quest on a platform dedicated to fanfiction, or at least archive it to one. I haven’t heard of quests on AO3, but Fimfiction (a site for My Little Pony fanfiction) has hosted two excellent MLP/Mass Effect crossovers with audience participation: The Equestrian Equation and Shades of Twilight.

Sufficient Velocity

There is a subforum “Quests” on the Sufficient Velocity forum site dedicated to quests. The software (xenForo) is repurposed forum software, but it includes procedures/tools for vote tallying and dice rolling.

Self-hosted

If the features available on other platforms are insufficient for the questmaster, they may choose to create their own site for maximal flexibility. d20 Pony has a custom website with custom pages such as an inventory, map, and ability/trait page reminiscent of a videogame.

Examples

To conclude, here’s a list of examples of the genre that I mentioned in this article.

d20 Pony (TVTropes)
The Equestrian Equation (TVTropes) and Shades of Twilight
The Last Trace
Moonstuck (TVTropes)
Problem Sleuth (TVTropes) (and other MS Paint Adventures)

The TVTropes page for Questden has a list of Questden adventures famous enough to get a TVTropes page.

Negative examples

While language is malleable, in my conception of what a quest is, I would consider the following to not be examples.

Zork and other text adventures, for example, ones created with Twine
Mass Effect videogames, or other videogames with preset choices
DnD or Fate played over Discord
West Marches I am on the fence about, depending on how the after-action reports are presented

Glossary

Here I create a small glossary of terms I’ve seen relating to this genre.

A quest is a work of fiction in which players decide the actions of one or more characters through successive rounds of commenting.
A player is a reader and participant.
The questmaster or QM is the author of a quest, and the one who gets the final say in deciding what happens.
A command is an action suggested by a player. Sometimes there is a distinction between comments that are simply commenting on the story and commands, which are intended to be acted on, as in d20 Pony, or sometimes there is none besides the QM’s reading of a player’s intentions.
A update or a post is a new portion of the quest created by the QM and open for commands.

I have frequently confounded Rangelost, the questmaster of d20 Pony, with my verbosity. They started using “[…]” to elide parts of commands because of me 😸. ↩︎
Rangelost. d20 Pony - About. https://d20pony.rangelost.net/about?page=player ↩︎
“A command… [c]annot attempt to manipulate the game. If you know something your character doesn’t, then you still cannot use that knowledge.” ↩︎
An article by The Verge claims that the abbreviation “CYOA” hasn’t triggered any action. Robertson A. The Choose Your Own Adventure publishers are trying to get the phrase banned from Itch.io. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003455/chooseco-choose-your-own-adventure-itch-io-trademark-infringement-takedown-notices. Published December 9, 2019. ↩︎
Taylor I. Choose Your Own Adventure publisher cracks down on Itch.io devs. GamesIndustry.biz. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/choose-your-own-adventure-publisher-cracks-down-on-itch-io-devs. Published December 10, 2019. ↩︎
Kaminsky M. Chooseco, “Choose Your Own Adventure” trademark owner, sues Netflix over “Bandersnatch.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michellefabio/2019/01/14/chooseco-choose-your-own-adventure-trademark-owner-sues-netflix-over-bandersnatch/. Published January 15, 2019. ↩︎

Pros and Cons of a Small Mastodon Instance

2023-08-26T00:00:00Z

Mastodon and its Fediverse alternatives^[1] have been all the rage since the major loss of user trust (the breaching of a “trust thermocline”^[2] if you will) brought on by a change in ownership in a previously dominant centralized competitor (Twitter). Today, we join the universe of fractalized, contradictory voices arguing about how to do Mastodon the Right Way™. Specifically, we consider the question of what instance you should join, and specifically, whether you should join a large, general-interest instance, or a more niche one.

A lot of these thoughts pertain to the general question of how to choose a server; see the Fedi.Tips page about this.

Pros and cons

Local timeline

One of the main reasons to be particular about choosing an instance is to get a local timeline that is more relevant to your interests. Try looking at the local timeline of any large general-interest instance, like the one for mastodon.social, and you’ll see a firehose of every post that every user on the instance makes. The problem is that this ends up being a stream of mostly irrelevant information, as most posts won’t be interesting to you, effectively rendering this feature useless.

On the other hand, try finding an instance on JoinMastodon.org’s server list and looking at its local timeline (for example, mastodon.gamedev.place or bookstodon.com). While there will still be general personal posts, there will be a lot more posts about the instance’s topic.

Mastodon has an emphasis on having individual users curate what they see over algorithmic curation of content. This is one of the many ways this is done. On the other hand, it is possible to ignore the local timeline completely.

Like/boost counts aren’t synced between instances, though I have heard that there is some work to change this. Until then, if a community that’s important to you is on a different instance, you may have a hard time seeing this info.

Vanity handle

The typical format for Mastodon handles is @username@domain, like @feditips@mstdn.social or @Teri_Kanefield@law-and-politics.online, with an inherited similarity to Twitter handles. Roughly half of the info on display in your handle is the instance domain name, and is a place where you can signal aspects of your identity or interests to others. A little attention to image is nothing to be ashamed of 😉.

You can use the instance to signal your interests/identity. There would be very little doubt that anyone on equestria.social or pony.social is a fan of My Little Pony, or on mstdn.ca wants to represent Canada as part of their identity.

If your identity and interests are truly eclectic such that you don’t want to be pinned down to a single thing, you may prefer to stick to a general-interest instance. mastodon.social is a special case in that it’s the closest thing to an “official” instance. Or, if brevity is the deciding factor, you can reach for the instance with the shortest domain name you can find like c.im or mas.to.

Ideology

If it matters to you, joining smaller instances prevents one instance from amassing too much control of the network. For example, mastodon.social has arguably reached the position of being unblockable (not technically, but practically) by virtue of being so large. As an instance admin, not being able to talk to accounts on the largest instance would hugely inconvenience your users enough to potentially abandon your instance, so it would be a tough decision if there were a reason you’d need to block mastodon.social. Therefore, it makes sense with a kind of Kantian logic that one should join a smaller instance.

Operator competence

As with any site you use, you place some degree of trust in the operators of the site, that they aren’t malicious (attempting to steal your secrets like passwords and DMs) or incompetent (using insecure configurations, accidentally deleting all the data, etc.).

Another axis of operations, besides the technical aspect, is moderation.^[3] A lack of moderation on your instance will have various negative consequences for you.

Bad actors will get up to making harassing posts that no one wants to see but them, with none to stop them.
This unmoderated state may get your instance defederated, resulting in your account being blocked by proxy.
Engaged users won’t want to deal with these problems and will migrate to other instances, further concentrating the bad actors.
Your instance won’t be blocking new instances that pop up with bad moderation, resulting in more trash coming your way.

Where instance size comes into the equation is what I’ll call the “scale heuristic”. There is a natural assumption that someone successfully operating a large Mastodon instance without any visible dumpster fires is competent, because a sufficient size would inevitably bring such problems to light. “Reputable” does often mean “familiar”. This being an assumption, there is nothing stopping a large instance from trudging on with just-good-enough-not-to-get-defederated moderation, or a small instance to be relatively free of problems.

Evaluating instances

If you’re considering joining an instance that isn’t a commonly recognized/reputable one, there is some due-diligence you can do.

Statistics

I unfortunately don’t know of a tool to easily check how trustworthy and well-maintained a Mastodon instance is (and I sense an opportunity for number-crunching aficionados). For large instances, my understanding is that every instance on joinmastodon.org meets a certain quality bar. demo.fedilist.com, although it’s still in development at the time of this writing, is useful, and you can manually perform the following checks.

Registrations open, unless you have some way to register otherwise.
A recent version is running, under the assumption that attentive staff are quick to update.
Monthly active users > 50 and posts/user > 40, or whatever threshold of activity suits you.
Running a fork of Mastodon or a less popular Mastodon alternative may be a positive or negative signal depending on your priorities. A fork suggests the operator has a certain savvy and is willing to navigate the differences involved in non-standard software. On the other hand, there is more potential for things to go wrong.

About/rules

There are also the information the instance itself provides on its /about page. An example of a very well-thought-out about page is the one for mstdn.social.

Does it have a well-thought-out list of rules? One that is more specific than “just be cool bro”?
Are you okay with all the rules? For example, some instances may not allow NSFW content period, while others will require a content warning, while others won’t require a content warning.
Does it publish a list of servers it’s defederated from (under the section “Moderated servers”)? Do you find the reasons given to be agreeable?

Owner

The owner will be included under “Administered by:”, or somewhere else in the instance about page. It’s a good idea to check their profile and ensure that they don’t seem too disagreeable.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’ve found this helpful in your search for the right instance. If you make the “wrong” choice of instance, Mastodon has a process to migrate instances^[4], which I haven’t tried myself, but which I see people do all the time. The process allows you to keep all your followers.

For brevity I will refer to just “Mastodon” going forward, but note that most of my thoughts will generalize to “its Fediverse alternatives” such as Firefish and Glitch ↩︎
Bull J [garius]. Thread by @garius on Thread Reader App. Published November 3, 2022. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html ↩︎
A natural disadvantage of decentralized systems is duplication of effort. As applied to the decentralized “instance” model of Mastodon, every instance owner duplicates at least a little bit of the work (technical and moderation decisions) of others. There are some ways this work can be shared or offloaded to others; for example, managed Mastodon offerings are beginning to appear, and news of badly moderated instances spreads via the #fediblock hashtag. ↩︎
Mudit. Change or Switch servers on Mastodon: Step-by-step guide. Published January 1, 2023. https://nerdschalk.com/change-or-switch-servers-on-mastodon-step-by-step-guide/ ↩︎

First Post; or, Why?

2022-12-26T00:00:00Z

In this post, I discuss why I created this blog, as well as the different options I considered for where to put it. Yes, after procrastinating as long as possible tweaking the CSS, it’s finally time to make my first post.

I won’t be talking about me much, however; instead there is the About Me page which I’ll be keeping updated.

Why write?

I’m sure there are myriad reasons for why people like to write (example), but here are mine. In fact, I’m so convinced that I’ll be embarking on a challenge to publish 100 blog posts in 365 days (100 Days To Offload); more on this in a future post.

Clearer thought

To me, writing is a part of understanding. The ability to clearly and concisely explain a concept to someone with as little concept as possible is proof that you have fully understood it. (This is an idea often attributed to Richard Feynman.) To me, my spoken words have always been kind of bumbling and stream-of-consciousness while my written words, with the power of editing, are eloquent by comparison. In my experience, writing forces the consolidation of thought. For a less intellectual example, journaling helps process, reframe, and label experiences, enough that it’s used quite a bit in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

While oral histories and the spoken word are older, the written word has a special status in the social domain. Indeed, according to The Information, literacy changes the way humans think about things, and not just the individuals that learned to read but the entire society. For example, a typical response from someone in a non-literate society when asked what a tree is would be “Just go outside and look at one”, versus one in a literate society, where the notion of what definitions are and why they’re important would be implicitly understood.^[1]

Learning the art

Much as any other skill, there is no better way to improving at the art of writing except by writing. That or maybe buying a book about writing and reading it instead of actually writing, not that I’d consider doing that. As for why, I want to be a good writer because there’s a certain pride in creating the finished product. I also really want more really good My Little Pony fanfictions to enter the world, ok?

Disturbingly, I’ve recently had more tip-of-the-tongue moments than I’m used to, which I really, really hope is just due to age or lack of practice and not some kind of brain damage.

External validation

Everyone who has a blog is putting oneself out there and at least has a distant hope that someone might read and appreciate their work. Otherwise, they’d just be writing a private journal in their word processor of choice (or, gasp, a physical journal). Writing in such a way to put oneself out there, there is always the possibility that I might become famous. I’ll settle for some updoots on Reddit or boosts/favorites on Mastodon though.

Another possibility is that someone, somewhere might derive some entertainment or useful information from my thoughts, which, needless to say, would be a great outcome too.

More realistically, I wonder if this blog is simply destined for obscurity. We can only wait and see.

Where to put the blog?

As you can see now, I’ve settled on creating my own website for my blog. Yet, the appeal of making the work of administering and paying for a website "somebody else’s problem"™ was not lost on me, and I thought quite a bit about this.

The Fediverse

I thought about hosting my blog somewhere on the Fediverse.

There’s Mastodon, but it is intended for microblogging. There is the 500-character limit on all posts, so I would be forced to chunk everything into threads. While this is really useful for enabling concise and fast-flowing conversation, the tooling is a pain for expressing longer, preplanned thoughts. Individual posts are rather ephemeral, and someone visiting my feed would be greeted with a giant list of all the posts I idly boost with no way to filter to my “proper” posts and no neat index of posts as would appear on a blog.

There are some Fediverse blogging offerings, but they have disadvantages. Plume is not under active development and doesn’t seem to be used very much. write.as has some very nice features like easy email newsletters, but these require payment. There are also the disadvantages of not managing the site myself, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Tumblr

Tumblr did seem to be an option. Offering my posts to a site with some kind of “The Algorithm™” would improve the discoverability of my blog. Unlike Mastodon, it can be used for proper long-form blogging, and even secretly offers an RSS feed for every blog. It also allows a much greater degree of control over theming than most non-self-hosted solutions. There is also a good deal of access to the MLP fan community, but little among hackers and software engineer types.

Fimfiction.net

Fimfiction.net actually does offer the ability to have a blog, though no RSS feed is generated, which would make it very difficult to follow if you’re not a frequent user of the site. I would only really use this if I wanted to exclusively write posts about My Little Pony fanfiction (reviews or updates on works in progress). It doesn’t seem like I’d get many eyeballs as only followers (of which I have barely any) who regularly check their feed can see it.

Bear

Bear (bearblog.dev) seems like a pretty solid minimalist blogging platform that a hacker might use. It supports custom domains. If I didn’t want to neurotically control every aspect of my site’s final appearance and functionality (and consequently have more time available for writing), it might have been a good choice for me.

Static website

It’s somewhat traditional, but I could host the blog as its own website with an RSS feed. Surprisingly, this option is actually free: there are at least a couple free static web hosts (amazing!) that support custom domains, such as GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages. GitLab Pages’ automatic SSL cert feature is awesome! Netlify is apparently a good paid option. Static webpages are just simple and resource-efficient. I already know/can learn my way around a static site generator, so the learning curve won’t be so hard for me. There is also the minor advantage of getting cred among hacker types for at least “operating” my own website.

I also have complete control of the data on the page, as well as the layout and formatting of my website. Arguably this is an anti-feature though, because I spent quite a long time tweaking the CSS on the site to my liking instead of writing anything! I am at least proud of how my site responsively reflows to suit different device and browser widths, and also the fact that there are zero accessibility warnings in Firefox’s accessibility inspector.

I also considered adding ActivityPub support to my blog somehow, but found that RSS is still the method of choice for, well, really simple syndication. Adding support is complicated; in fact, there is no way to do it without a server and database, and it is far more complex and resource-intensive than RSS.^[2] Thus, there’s no easy way to make pair a static website host with ActivityPub, yet, and it seems likely that future easy solutions will be paid thanks to the resource requirements. There is a plugin that makes this easy for WordPress, though. I will just have to settle with making a post on Mastodon whenever I publish a blog post, which can double as a comment section for it, and which I don’t have to moderate all by myself.

As for discoverability, it won’t be that great, but for each new blog post, I intend to post on Mastodon with a few hashtags, and maybe join a webring or two.

Another disadvantage is that if I die and stop paying my domain name provider for the domain, it will end up becoming a broken link. This might happen eventually to any of the other alternative services I mentioned, but at least it wouldn’t be because of me. At least, if that happens, it should still be archived by archive.org.

Conclusion

I think I should end this post before it expands too much. (This sounds like a skill that I’m sure I’ll get the hang of sometime.) I hope you enjoyed reading this meta-post. If my writing style or past works sound interesting, consider adding this site to your favorite RSS reader or following me on Mastodon.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. London: Fourth Estate, 2012. ↩︎
Tom MacWright, “Playing with ActivityPub,” macwright.com, December 9, 2022, https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html. ↩︎