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(Re-)Launch of scy.name

2025 is the year I'm finally taking the time to have a fucking website again. Welcome.

Let me talk a bit about why I've decided to do this.

❤️‍🩹 Content Note: The following text mentions death, Elon Musk, and US politics.

Like tears in the rain

I've had a blog since 2004. Even a bit longer, but my early blogging attempts have not been preserved, I think. But you can still read my 2004 blog posts if you wanted to.1

I joined Twitter in 2008 and stopped blogging in 2010. Can you still read my tweets from 2008? Not really; I've deleted my account when Elon Musk took over.

In 2019, I set up2 my own single-user Mastodon instance. Can you still read my posts from it? No, because I moved to chaos.social in 2022 and shut down my instance.

Will you still be able to read my chaos.social posts in 10 years? Who can say? I wouldn't be so sure.

My old blog posts are still there.3 Newer blog posts would be, too, if only I had, you know, written some. But instead I put my thoughts and insights onto Social Media™, because it was easier, faster, and more engaging.

Enough of this

I'm 42 years old now. (In fact, I became 42 years old today, which is why this website is launching today.) And I'm becoming more and more grumpy with the status quo, and with the way we as a society deal with information, and the preservation of information.

Cool URIs don't change, said Sir Tim Berners-Lee back in nineteen ninety-eight(!), but what about URIs that just … vanish? Because some company went bankrupt, or got bought by a Nazi? Or because someone didn't renew their domain, or simply, I don't know, died?

Sure, we can get some of that content back by asking the Internet Archive, with the added benefit that browsing the web there even gives you the bandwidth experience of the nineties back. But is it really wise, in the long run, to centralize our collective memory to one single organization? An organization headquartered in the United States of Throwing Undesirable Data Away? An organization that's running on donations?

2025 is the year I've really started to Deliberately Archive Shit Again. I keep copies of my favorite YouTube videos. I buy Blu-rays of my favorite movies and series. I buy my favorite songs on Bandcamp, or Beatport, or whatever. All because streaming is fleeting.

You can't trust that streaming services will still be available next year. Or they might just replace your favorite song with a remastered version that sounds slightly different. Or they simply delete your favorite show because fuck you for thinking that you might be able to show it to your child one day.

And social media, even if it's decentralized, open, user-driven social media, I would argue, is a streaming service, too, in a way. It's fleeting. Stuff can disappear at any time, for all kinds of reasons.

The role of Social Media™

When I first joined Mastodon, I wanted to have my own instance, on my own domain, so that I could always stay in control of the preservation of my posts. If I joined someone else's server, they could delete my stuff, on purpose or not. Or they could simply cease to exist, and without having the control over the domain, all my cool URIs would now have vanished, too, and there's nothing I could do about it. Which is why I had a single-user instance, on my own domain.4

From time to time, I still see people complaining that migrating a Mastodon account loses all your existing posts. And even Fedi implementations like GoToSocial, which does support importing old posts, have to admit that it's a far from perfect solution: You can't import replies (neither to you nor from you to anyone else), no mentions of other accounts, and, lol, no polls.

I get where these complaints are coming from: You've spent a lot of time writing Fedi posts, alt texts, elaborate threads, whatever, and you don't want all of that to be lost to time. I feel your pain. But I'm here to tell you: Let it go.

Social Media is not meant to be permanent. Never was, never will be. It's always either someone else's domain, or, if it's your domain, the very nature of social media as we know it today requires it to be a server-side application. Chances are it simply will be end-of-life in 15 years, or you (or someone else) will have lost all interest (or skill) in updating it during that time. Or you simply died.

You know what will still be here? Static files.

Meet the POSSE

POSSE is an acronym from the IndieWeb subculture: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. And I think that's the only viable approach if you really care about the longevity of the stuff you create.

And it's exactly what I'm back to do, some 15 years after my blog went into hiatus.

I'll be posting my stuff here, where I can make sure that it stays available even long after I'm gone. And then I'll be posting copies of it, or pointers to it, on social media, to allow it to spread beyond RSS subscribers and search engines. But the real, canonical place for what I create will always be my own website.

After 15 years of trying out corporate and community-based social media, I'm back where I started, but I'm happy to be back.

  1. Not that you should. Most are kind of boring or cringe. ↩

  2. and by "set up", I mean "rented from Masto.host" ↩

  3. Basically none of the external links in any of my posts are working anymore, but that's a different story. ↩

  4. Observant readers might have noticed that I previously said that my single-user instance's posts are not available anymore. These readers might also assume that since I had the technical means to keep an archive of my posts available under their old URIs, their unavailability to this day was a result of me simply not having taken the time to set up such an archive site yet. These readers would be correct. ↩