Librarian of Alexandria

For my entire adult life—ever since I could write a blog engine myself—I've been using self-written blogging software. I gradually went through languages (Python, Haskell, Scheme) and frameworks (web.py, flask, snap, spock...) but always relying on homemade tools. If I had infinite time, I still would! I love the hand-rolled parts of the web, and want to be part of it if I can.

But recently I've also been wanting to switch to using ActivityPub more and more: I've been using my Mastodon account significantly more often than my Twitter account and I've also been thinking I should get a PixelFed account as well.

And of course, using non-self-hosted blogging software is completely out of the question for me! I very much want to own my own data and my own platforms, if I can.

Between all this, I decided to switch to using WriteFreely, an ActivityPub-enabled (and therefore Mastodon-compatible) blogging platform that's self-hosted. I'm still getting used to it! I might have enabled it poorly and I might end up forking it to add some features I already miss, even if those features are just footnotes in Markdown, but I think it's an experiment worth trying!