I’m [redacted] and this is where I host some of my projects.
Ok but why don’t you just use social media like a normal person?
Here are some things I don’t want to happen to me on the internet:
- I don’t want content I upload and browsing patterns I generate to be monetised and sold to third parties.
- I don’t want content I upload to be hidden from other internet users who also choose not to have accounts on specific websites.
- I don’t want content I upload to be subject to arbitrary moderation rules that serve the interests of western, monolingual, dominant culture-centred capitalism.
- I don’t want content I upload to remain available to platform administrators if I decide to remove it from public view.
- I don’t want content I upload to be at risk of arbitrary deletion.
- I don’t want to see advertising.
- I don’t want algorithms to hide content from sources I want to see.
- I don’t want algorithms to show me content from sources I haven’t chosen to see.
- I don’t want to be denied control over the layout and design of content I upload and the pages on which it’s presented.
- I don’t want to have to log into multiple websites and apps to upload content or see the content uploaded by others.
- I don’t want to use a platform where “engagement” with content is measured numerically and statistics are constantly displayed to users..
- I don’t want to be part of an online “community” where unwritten rules of etiquette make interacting with other people stressful and difficult.
The best way for me to engage with the internet in a way that most closely matches my moral and ethical principles, allows me to control my data, and preserves my mental health is to host content on my own domain and use decentralised protocols (RSS, ActivityPub, IMAP) to view content uploaded by others. Other internet users may find the same is true of them.
Linking to me
If you’d like to do so, here are some non-aesthetic buttons:
- 50 x 50:
- 88 x 31:
- 200 x 40:
Check my siteroll for a list of other people’s cool websites I enjoy. Mutual relationships aren’t required.
Interests
Things I am generally enthusiastic about:
29270, ancient egypt, androgyny, anglican choral music, archiving, auron, auron/braska, bach, banquo, baroque music, bash, big red guys, big-endianness, braska, brittany, brutalism, celtic languages, centre-ouest bretagne, choral music, criticism, crystal castles, css, culture, decentralisation, deconstruction, dermot morgan, dion lesage, ditto, dns, drake, early music, editor macros, education, elp, emacs, environmentalism, europe, fandom, fandom meta, fanfiction, father ted, final fantasy, final fantasy vi, final fantasy x, final fantasy xvi, france, free software, frodo/sam, groupe bel, heraldry, hignfy, humanities, idents, jethro tull, judas priest, king crimson, larkin, laïcité, linguistics, linux, lolitics, loth’s line, macbeth, massive attack, master/servant pairings, matter of britain, meta, migratory john hurt fandom, modernism, molière, mononymic societies, monty python, music engraving, music theory, my mad fat diary, nfshost, nobuo uematsu, old french, orchestration, org-mode, orthography, orwell, parkour, peep show, peripherality, peurunvan, phan, philip k dick, pink floyd, poher, pokémon, portishead, postmodernism, pride and prejudice cinematic universe, prog, public transport, publishing, python, rabelais, rapid transit, richie faulkner, romance languages, rté, science fiction, shakespeare, sir terence, slash, socialism, sonic the hedgehog, stationery, subdomains, surrealism, sustainability, television history, tesco, tex, the beatles, the hunger games, the live mike, the lizzie bennet diaries, the prisoner, the strasbourg oaths, the wicker man, theory, trance, tristan and iseut, trouvères, typesetting, typography, urbex, vaporwave, vhemt, vinyl, vorgium, walt whitman, warrior cats, web 1.0, werewolves, wolves, writing, xml, xsl
Cultural frame of reference
- I was born in the early nineties.
- I am from the UK and have lived here most (but not all) of my life. I don’t live in England. Whether I grew up in England is up for debate.
- I am a native speaker of English and one other language.
- I don’t tend to watch television programmes.
- My first exposure to fandom culture was in the mid-2000s, through a friend who liked Final Fantasy VII, but I wrote my first fanfiction on paper when I was 5.
- Otherwise, I don’t think details about my offline life/identity are particularly interesting or relevant in this context.
Principles
- I believe in self-hosting where possible (for a definition of “self-hosting” that means “being able to ssh into the server”).
- I don’t consider myself a member of any online group or collective. I don’t join webrings or affiliate with other website administrators. Any links to other sites are here simply because I like their content, and don’t imply knowledge or endorsement of their maintainers.
- I don’t use any trackers, cookies, or analytics services. I believe in the right to lurk.
- Most of this site is coded by hand. The only static site generators I use are those I wrote myself.
- My political views are broadly anarcho-communist. Sharing my political opinions is not a prerequisite for interacting with me.
- This site is an amateur project, i.e. instead of earning money from it, I spend money on maintaining it. Everything here was made for my own enjoyment, but you can look at it too if you’re interested.
Contact + feeds
Any email sent to the @praze.net domain will reach me.
I don’t use for-profit social media. I run a Pleroma server on this domain, where I post shortform content on two accounts:
Rather than using third-party websites, I track some of my activities here.
Verifying my identity
I own and administer the praze.net domain. All content on this domain is authored by me with the exception of the git.praze.net and ple.praze.net subdomains, where a couple of accounts belong to very close associates.
On other domains
Outside this domain, the following accounts belong to me:
- pilpaotr on discogs
- spira.cedex on discord
- tobli on dreamwidth
- litrovers on last.fm
- cornoz on spotify
- trovere on steam
- blorbeauxdujour on tumblr
The accounts ovely and ulsterbus on archiveofourown.org also belong to me and are used as selective mirrors of my fanfiction.
The following accounts also belong to me, but are empty/dormant/used only to bypass login walls or interact with other users’ content:
- dixans on bluesky
- tremeur29 on github
- 88001641 on pixiv
- dermotmorgan on tumblr
Anything not on this list isn’t mine. I haven’t linked the accounts directly because this isn’t intended as a carrd-style “where to find me”, although it’s pretty easy to find the actual urls for any of these profiles, obviously.
Shtack
- Domain registration, DNS: NearlyFreeSpeech
- Shared hosting (FreeBSD + Apache, New York): NearlyFreeSpeech
- git.praze.net
- tre.praze.net
- + RSS reader
- VPS (Debian + nginx, London): Vultr
- links.praze.net
- ple.praze.net