Fuck It, I Guess I'll Stick With This 2019-12-22

Recently someone I know had mentioned Mastodon (the social web site framework, not the band) and I became moderately interested in having something similar. I like that it is federated rather than a monolithic digital silo, but would prefer to self host something like that rather than leave it up to someone else to decide when it is no longer worth keeping my data on their server. The good news is that Mastodon is open source and anyone can run an instance, the bad news is that it is pretty resource heavy and it does not make sense to buy "a lot" of hardware to run a simple service. The same person who urged me to look at Mastodon suggested that maybe I'd be better off with Pleroma instead. The good news is that it [apparently] runs on as little as a Raspberry Pi, the bad news is that it has a parade of shitty dependencies and installation instructions [for Debian] that don't really seem to add up. I had a bit of a look around and also checked out Misskey, Blog, Hexo, Qvitter, Pelican, Known, WriteFreely, Pixelfed, Jekyll, Micro.Blog, Tokumei, Twister, Movim, twtxt, Nanoblog, ShaarliGo, screech, Pump.io, and Okuna... but they all had varying degrees of

• shitty dependencies
• not having a self hosted option and/or
• not being an actual quick blogging framework

Really, all I want is a way to quickly type out a few sentences, browse/select an image file, and hit sumbit... without having to trust my data to some asshole corporation that requires worldwide, royalty free, unlimited permission to use, share, sell, or fuck with my content any way they wish. I don't even really need to be part of some fancy federated network. I just want to post quick photos and smartass comments and then maybe link to them on FaceBorg or something. Then I tried GNU Social. I like the way it looks but it seems to be abandonware (in fact I think it was what Mastodon was forked from). Mastodon and Pleroma are supposedly compatible with GNU Social, but that interaction wasn't working for me, and since I really didn't care I didn't try hard to make it work. It also doesn't link well in mainstream services that everyone else uses (you know which one I am talking about).

I also tried Chyrp, well Chyrp-Lite actually, and it seemed to look decent enough but it doesn't really allow for layout of a post. You can upload a photo and it'll even [sort of] manage it for you but it is always at the top of the post followed by your text. It also doesn't preview very well on that popular sharing site everyone uses (you know which one I mean).

I even thought of crawling back to Wurdpress. Over the years I have used Wurdpress a few times and although it is easy to layout a quick media-enhanced post, it is a javascript and security nightmare. You can use it without plugins, but you won't like it. Obviously the huge plugin base is what makes it attractive to a lot of people. However, the plugins are a security train wreck... and the constant updates for both the core framework and the plugins is a pain too.

Adding content to this [HTML and CSS only] site is slower than just pushing out photos with smartass remarks to a Wurdpress site, but this is what I am sticking with for now. You think I'll make a mess here by just posting small crappy things that are even less important than what is already here? Perhaps we'll find out.

The neighbour's yard	The swamp
Merrygold in the field	Looking back over the swamp
Bridge to nowhere	Trail to nowhere