I have a gloriously reduced monthly subscription footprint and application footprint because of all the motherfuckers that tied ChatGPT or other AI into their garbage and updated their terms to say they were going to scan my private data with AI.

And, even if they pull it, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. No more cloud drives, no more ‘apps’. Webpages and local files on a file share I own and host.

This. Throwing your trash on the ground because you can’t find a trash can amounts to childish entitlement in my eyes.

No trash cans in the forest, is OP saying they just litter all through nature when they go camping?

I’d go back to the Yukon Gold Rush and make sure Fred Trump never made it out of Canada.

Edit: Doh! No consequences… huh. I’m not really sure it would be worth the trip then.

Most importantly always break well before a turn in snow. Never break in a turn.

Revenge of the Nerds when I was 7. Adult forgot about the peephole scene.

I downvote it when its opinion is clearly wack. Like when it tries to give Washington Post a highly trusted rating after all the inflammatory, biased shit they’ve been putting out.

I mean, gas is the original surge pricing commodity, they have had dark patterns in their pricing long before other companies.

60? Doesn’t that put you closer to GenX? Was there a “cusp” generation like Xennials?

Banana Cow.

Not the new age bar drink but the old school member of the Strawberry Cow, Chocolate Cow syrups line for kids to make Chocolate/Strawberry/Banana milk.

I think it depends on personal preference and what kind of user you are.

If you are going to engage in trolling and just being the kind of person someone wouldn’t want to hire its probably best to hide your identify.

Likewise of you just want to keep it a secret.

My identity has been out there on the internet for a long time. Ran a web community, work in IT. I might delve into grayer topics on social media than on LinkedIn, but I try to check myself and ensure I’m considering others and my behavior before allowing myself to just pump raw emotion into comments.

Not going to claim to be 100% successful at either of those but hey I try.

I limit what information is shared about me as much as I can afford to given the nature of the industry I work in.

Yes. Though its dated now. Really didn’t have any bright ideas for an avatar when I joined.

EDIT: Updated it to match my tenforward.social one.

Always into a good Denim sandwich myself.

A Jandwich if you willl.

I wont lie, it hurt to shut The Den of Amateur Writing down. That place was a product of the heart. So many good memories.

As I get older I find my heels and arches just hurt randomly walking on hard flooring, and carpets get gross. The solution for me is a pair of sketchers I reserve for indoor use.

The rate at which the results got worse has a notable pattern in line with their drive for ad revenue. Most of the results are garbage because they are driven by money rather than user choice and popularity. The more money you pour into tuning SEO and Google Ads the higher you rank. To hell with relevance or what users actually want.

I ran a web community for writers from 1997 onward, and threw in the towel this year. The site had a core following but we relied on a steady trickle of new users from organic search and word of mouth to stay afloat. And little by little no matter how much time I put into SEO and the site we continued to slide due to a combination of seo rank and google just removing pages without explanation or reason. After spending the last 5 years rebuilding the site for SEO and mobile optimization, I watched google index 99% of the sitemap, our rank come back up slightly, new users starting to come in… And then it just… Stopped. I went to check the indexing, and google had silently moved all the indexed pages back to “crawled but not indexed” for no bloody reason. Zero errors, codes or messages.

I threw in the towel. The site was costing me nearly $500usd a month to operate and I could not throw a dime at ads. I had tried getting ad revenue on the site a few years back even though I did not want ads on the site and it looked promising… I got 90% of the way to covering monthly costs, but before the first cheque was cut google banned me from that service with no explanation. I followed every rule, discouraged regular members from clicking ads unless they really wanted to see the thing the ad was showing. Still got banned. And google just doesn’t even care to explain themselves.

I closed the site in January because I realized the internet I fell in love with, the one I created that community for… Its dead. Killed by capitalism.

Might be for the best. I can throw my coding time at open-source projects now. Just need to find one that entices me.

My client is just set to not display nsfw posts. I never see it and I’ve blocked very few communities.

Brand recognition if you’re in the market for a job relevant to the contents of your site or if you plan to run a blog.

Otherwise custom domain is really just vanity.

Ah sorry, I’m an SRE/Devops guy professionally so I forget that containers are still way out of folks experience range 😅

Yeah fair, I think of them as simple… Guess I’ve been in the trenches too long 😂

If you are looking for true low maintenance, avoid needing a DB. So I’d stay away from the WordPress suggestions. Not to mention keeping WordPress CVE free is often a full time job and the opposite of low maintenance.

I’d use one of the many tools out there that takes Markdown and coverts it to HTML, stick that in a basic CI job on Gitlab or Github to build out my HTML and I jusy write markdown.

Once that’s in place how I would decide if I wanted a custom domain.

If I don’t need a custom domain, then I can just augment the pipeline to publish to Gitlab/Github pages.

If I want a custom domain then it depends on budget and expected traffic, but I’d likely just put it on an ECS container or in an S3 bucket and shove cloudfront in front of it, because if it’s small enough it will likely qualify for free tier AWS. If it’s too big for free tier then I’d stick with a container but likely either put it on a cheap cloud node with Apache and letsencrypt and one of the smaller providers like Linode/DO/Vultr