I have been running my website at taborsky.cz for more than twenty years now. At the beginning, I hosted everything myself, just because there was no other way. I hand-crafted my HTML, or used PHP for some simple templating to automate it.
As the years progressed, I started using third party services for posting my articles. First Blogger from Google, later Medium. These things were a massive upgrade. I especially liked Medium’s simplicity and focus on the content.
However great these services are from usability perspective, they have one fatal flaw. They are out of my control. The topic of personal freedom has become more important for me in the past couple of years. I gradually realized that I was, same as almost everyone, getting too dependent on platforms of various kinds—be they centralized social networks or the publishing services I used.
Maybe I have become more sensitive to these stories, but I see an increasing rate of people’s accounts getting suspended or deleted for publishing some content, which the platform does not like. I am not disputing the right of Facebook, Medium or any other business to do whatever they want with their site. They are perfectly fine to censor or block anyone they feel like it. I am not going to fight them on that. I just want to opt out.
So I decided to go back to the idea of decentralized internet, where I am in control. But obviously I am too lazy to go back to maintaining the site by hand. Therefore, I started to use Hugo static site generator to build the site and here we are.
I always like to think positive, so don’t take this move as “leaving” something but “moving towards” something else.
I am gradually converting the old content from other platforms and formats, to preserve it.
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