fen

Technically this is a bit self-aggrandizing, because I'm going to be using this space to talk about, well, this space. More directly, I wanted to have a place off my main social accounts to be able to talk about the things I'm learning and implementing as part of my self-hosting journey.

Moving to the Fediverse in November 2022 was wonderful, and if you're reading this you probably shared a similar journey as I did moving from a centralized social media platform to a decentralized one. I'm not the first nor the last who would say that the Fediverse as a whole feels like the internet did in the 90s and early 2000s, before modern social media was a thing. But while that was a decentralized, disconnected internet, this one's a decentralized but cross-talking one. That's a huge difference.

Could you imagine as an individual hosting your own microblogging platform 10 years ago and it being worthwhile? I have a little tiny twitter in my server and it talks to all the other little tiny twitters. Wild. Suck it T2 and Bluesky.

Anyway, that's the hook. After a wonderful 6 months on tech.lgbt curiosity got the better of me and I kicked up zoner.gay as an experiment to see what self-hosting was like, and as it turned out it was better than expected.

Then, as luck would have it, Reddit pulled a Twitter and so now there's another thing that needed replacing. I'll probably write another post on Lemmy/kbin because that's still a work in progress, but shork.online has been up for about 8 weeks and has served as another bit of learning in its own right.

I've never been a FOSS fanatic, but it's satisfying to be able to be in control of my own data and presence, and have that be respected. I don't use the internet or social media the same way as most, and to be able to control that interface between me and the rest of the world has become immensely valuable.

So for now, the 'Fenternet' is Akkoma via zoner.gay, Owncast via oc.zoner.gay, Lemmy via shork.online and this Writefreely instance. I plan to keep growing to make a space that fits my needs, and to continue learning about how these services and microservices run and are deployed as part of my own personal (and maybe someday professional) development.

And, I like to think that someday maybe I can help provide a safe space to the people who are important to me. At the end of the day, that's sort of the whole point of this for me. Even in just ¾ of a year, I've formed some incredible relationships that transcend whatever platform we're on. For me, that's the end goal – these things are meant to connect us, and should never get in the way of doing so.