Ever since, this part of my blogs has a long-standing tradition of drifting into "meta" content of me rambling (and at times muttering) about the tools I use, the places I somehow and more regularly use to keep stuff online, and the numerous dissatisfactions in balancing curiosity for tools, consistency, long term commitment and being overwhelmed by the load of effort required to have a lot of things out there in parallel, unsure which is there for which reason actually and which might be redundant and yet hard to get rid of.

This weekend has been an interesting insight from that particular perspective, mostly in terms of inner and outer contrasts. I've been out there, travelling to Upper Lusitania, visiting Herrnhut and Löbau and walking an old region with some rather unique traditions and history and was, for reasons, quite "here". At the same time, I'm always equally connected, and I've been following the unfolding mess related to pagecord, IndieWeb ethos, the use of generative AI for building and maintaining software as well as for processing data without user consent. And in a way it felt unsettling, to say the very least. I do have a specific opinion on the use of LLMs and AI in most scenarios and definitely stand with people criticising pagecord here; this kind of behaviour is irreponsible and inappropriate especially also in the way he used to publicly state it. I don't, for that matter, want to be on a system hosted by someone who runs an agent-generated script on a production instance without apparently even looking at the generated code. This feels so massively wrong in so many ways, I don't even know where to start. (There's probably a lot more, generally, on using or avoiding technology that involves using large language models, vibe coding and the like, but this doesn't make sense in here now.)

But there's an other aspect to that too: I remember pagecord being a somewhat new phenomenon. It just popped up on my radar earlier this year, and it popped up the same way a lot of other of these platforms, frameworks, tools tend to pop up: There' some sudden buzz about it, people start writing about it, suddenly half of my timeline seems to adopt it and the list of posts announcing blog or content migration is becoming overwhelming. It repeatedly happens, and still is happening. Sometimes I fall for that and discover new environments that make sense and feel good and cozy (hello, omg.lol), some made sense and worked well before turning difficult and unbearable (hello, micro.blog).  

It's usually nice and interesting. It's about wrestling technology, about finding things that work well, about exploring options and following minor pet projects here and there but I increasingly feel bad about that. It feels much more than everything exhausting, it's all about ending up with a plethora of different moving parts and pieces that are out there and demanding their share of daily hours to make sense. It's about too many different things out there that at some point contain data, data I by then don't want to delete but also data I'm unable to collect, store, consolidate anywhere else in a meaningful structure or manner. Thinking "pet projects" it essentially and very much feels exactly like that - a pet that used to be cute and soothing to have but then it's left alone out there in the wild along with a dark feeling of guilt for not taking care of it in an appropriate, sufficient way. So, for the contrast, last weekend, out there and surrounded by nature and hills and old churches and villages, I've been trapped in pondering way too much about how much of this effort is still worth it, how much of this effort I do want to take and which kind of effort, for now, might make sense to limit or stop. Needless to say, these decisions never are particularly easy. General idea, however and so far: 

• I'm focussing most of my daily posts on status.z428.eu, including for now links to music that matters to me (instead of using crucialtracks), links and all sorts of images and image galleries, reducing usage of some.pics and resting pixels.z428.eu and frame.z428.eu for the time being. This page - log.z428.eu - will stay for longform articles (which I rarely do these days) and as an archive of most of my former blog posts dating back to ... 2005, I think, even though some of them have been pruned throughout the years for various reasons. 
• In a way, with this setup, I'll see to and strive get closer to that "hardcore indieweb" approach, while at the same time also honouring the fact that my needs are different: Most ot my writing doesn't happen on a laptop or desktop or with a dedicated editing or build environment around. Most of my writings and posts happen from on the road, using a smartphone and a small display and on-creen keyboard and mobile internet access and this quite somehow changes needs and demands. It makes static site generators a non-option, as it makes fiddling with markup and code of some sort an option not too desirable. So, I'm still relying on a third party PHP based blogging software which I keep myself from advertising all too much for now, having mixed feelings about it. Currently pondering other solutions, including maybe a more lightweight PHP based tooling that does server-sided generation of more or less static HTML and CSS artifacts but I'm not there yet and this doesn't have much priority at the moment.
• I'll keep omg.lol running as the only subscription to an external service of this kind. Adam does an amazing job here technically and community-wise, and even though at the moment I just use a limited subset of these things, I still have paid for some years in advance, will renew this then and now and maybe also throw some coins into his tip jar, eagerly waiting for this to proceed. Maybe at some time Adam will come up with some sort of publishing platform to help cutting down on some more of these loose ends.

Another attempt to get more consistency into things, and a little less load. Maybe it will stay this way, maybe not. Maybe at some point (rudely and technically speaking) I'll just revert things, go from POSSE to PESOS and try and build an RSS aggregator to collect whatever I post elsewhere into one personal archive. Maybe not. We'll see. It's a matter of steps.

(There's a personal note to it, which I am unsure whether it belongs here but I feel the urge to keep it close to the rest of the thoughts. This article and its conclusions came into being mainly following a couple of e-mails sent to myself the last couple of days, which still is my favourite means of notekeeping. The article got polished and as reviewed as possible while out in the garden, picking the last blackberries of the season which might end up in my breakfast tomorrow, as well as some remaining raspberries which I immediately savoured because they're best right off the branches of the bush. Still, my fingers bear some of the colours of blackberries and soil. And I remembered pondering articles, back then, in the first late year in the garden, back in 2019. That's when I just fully moved to the Fediverse, specifically Mastodon, and that's when I reclaimed my own blog after having been on ugly proprietary walled gardens for nearly a decade. For quite a while I did long-form writing and blogging, after moving off Wordpress, and it was very much about the texts and snippets to be posted. I still don't know at all why I do that and maybe that's not important at all, but somehow I feel that just writing a private personal diary doesn't feel like reason enough to actually write so writing semi-public text snippets, or texts that are public without easily being grasped lacking some personal context, seems the best way for me to get some thoughts and considerations and observations out of my inner cosmos. At some point, I tilted towards shorter snippets. Of course, both because technology - namely Mastodon and back then that bird - had strong limits towards text length, but also ... because, in some situations, I noticed my mental capacity being consumed by wrestling choice and its side effects. Like, where I would spend time considering how to put certain observations into words, I then would more and more end up wondering where to post certain texts or images and how to make people that matter to me see it. Own domains, Fediverse services, microblogging services, and so much more - the grass is always greener elsewhere, there's always an even better tool, and in the end things are all spread around and hard to handle, especially to someone like me who's essentially a collector, who feels almost physical pain even thinking about permanently deleting former creations permanently off the web. This, without a doubt, is a rather personal point of view, and I don't feel like judging anyone doing this in any other way, but for me, just spinning up another blog, keeping it for a few days or weeks and then wiping it again is something that will never ever work. And this makes things more complex. But it can be addressed. I cannot change the fact that people dear to me are spread all across Mastodon, Bluesky, Diaspora* and Tumblr. But I can keep myself from introducing the side-effects and ultimately stress and mental load coming from too many sources or platforms to voluntarily maintain. I can reduce things here. Same as I can make listening to music more intense again by giving up on all kinds of streaming and buying one or two albums a month on bandcamp. Or as I can stop streaming videos and buy a movie or DVD from some provider of trust then and now. There's plenty of everything. There's in some cases even too much of everything. I don't want to spend that much time and capacity dealing with choice anymore. I want to make less decisions, more informed choices and stick with them for as long as somewhat possible. When picking blackberries or taking care of sunflowers, I want to think about things to put into words, not merely where to store these words. And maybe this needs different approaches.)

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