I recently changed my Bluesky handle from @simmervigor.bsky.social to @simmervig.org. I did this using the HTTP validation method, which relies on providing custom responses to /.well-known/atproto-did. The blog explains how I used Hono to set up a simple request router and run it in Cloudflare Workers. You too can use this method to easily and quickly set up a bunch of handles under a unified organisation e.g., @alice.example.org and @bob.example.org.

This website was previously powered by a self-hosted WordPress, running on a VPS. In front of that, sat Cloudflare and its APO product that helped to speed it up and reduce burden on the origin.

The origin server was an old-school, janky, LAMP stack. In spite of the rest of the world seeming having ditched LAMP (or its ilk) and performing a chain of moves from the hottest static site framework year-to-year, I took a certain joy in the legacy. I liked the fact I was dogfooding the experience of taking a weak origin and magically turning it into something that can operate at Internet scale with a few button clicks.

Lately though, there’s been a bit of bluster in the world of WordPress. I have little skin in that game, other than as an end-user of a software product that I have to run and maintain. That meant having posts on the matter thrust into my WordPress dashboard under the “Wordpress News and Events” panel. Sure, I can remove that panel, but it used to have some value. Abusing the panel to inundanate me with WordPress politics is not cool. And the more I’ve read, the more it seems like there are some very blurry lines between the WordPress open-source project, WordPress foundation, wordpress.org, wordpress.com, WPTavern.

This site is simple and has infrequent content updates. WordPress was really overkill for my needs. However, maintaining it did have some toil. wordpress.org decided to tell me in my dashboard that they had blocked some sites from their update servers. Am I next? Probably not. Yet, the fussing about I’ve seen on the Internet the past couple of weeks has given me the kick up the arse to finally ditch WordPress. I started the migration away from WordPress a few days ago, and in the meantime the situation has continued to escalate in absurdity. In the words of Blumhouse, its time to say NOPE, GET OUT.

For as long as I’ve used email, someone else has provided it to me for “free”. Detoxing in January is a staple, so why not extend that to weening off Google and call it a degox.

This was supposed to be a short post about my experience migrating to Fastmail. However, it went sideways and turned into an essay. I’ve knitted together various experiences and topics from over the decades. I’ve come to the slow realization that this choice, to take back my Internet Privacy and Presence, isn’t a new year fad to be dropped unceremoneously by February.