My Stack for a Small(er) Scale Future

I've played with technology for a long time. It began with a Commodore Vic20. I remember the internet before the "world-wide web" was born. It was only later in life that I made a living in technology. It scarred me. It's likely true of any passion that becomes a chore. But this is something more. I've the network stack scale (verb; sic) ominously - built for data collection, attention economics and algorithimic exploitation. It was my business for a while to think up ways to integrate these traits with older technology built to simply do accounting and insurance. It was an ugly business. One that I'm still recovering from. Against (at least my own) expectations, I find myself with an opportunity to change course in my life with help of family and loved ones. This journal will document the route I'm finding piecewise.

Having developed a metabolic intolerance for social platforms, I thought to follow a POSSE strategy. I like the independence of my own site and cross-posted to other platforms where my friends and a larger audience of those I've yet to meet might be able to find me. It seemed simple. It wasn't.

It's been a long while since I first played around with blogging some 20 years ago. I found a bloated wordpress ecosystem, rife with social media drama, a maze of largely unnecessary add-ons and services to round out the idea modern website -- optimized for search, monetizing, ready to mine user data and growth strategies. Ugh.

My first efforts were kludgy things. I just gave up.

As an aside, anyone else notice that every piece of software and service wants to be the dashboard of my life/work? My hosting provider has a dashboard that mostly just copies the Wordpress dashboard, through which I can find my individual add-on dashboards. How many calendar's are offered to you in your daily tools? OS calendar, webmail calendar, Outlook (bless your heart), Zoom calendar, leather bound paper calendar?

The whole stack of our daily lives has become both ugly and exploitative ala late stage capitalism.

So I'm starting again, on Listed. It's unobstrusive. That's what I want from a tool. It does a thing, hopefully well, and little else. I'll spread my writings around the platforms, but I'd prefer if you read it here. I'm tinkeringing around with a static, flat-file CDN delivered website ... something simple and small ... in case Listed ever goes poof.

But here you'll find my daily research journals and drafts of longer pieces.