I swear there's a good reason for it this time though.

So when I first set up the first post, I did so on Bear Blog. It actually seemed promising enough. It too was yearning for that era of the Internet where we didn't have everything crammed down our throats subscription-first.

Then right after I posted, I realised they paywall features and changed their previously quite open licence to a more restrictive one that refused to allow self-hosting.

So an hour or two later, I moved to WriteFreely, spun up an easy LXC using Community Scripts, configured it, pointed Traefik at it, pointed my DNS settings at Traefik, and hey, self-hosted custom domain blog here we are.

Sure, it's not as minimalist as Bear, but whatever. It works. And blogging is the more important thing.

If I feel really bad about it, I suppose I could vibe code something simple that will give me hours of torture later.

Again.

The thing is, I've been hiding for a while, and I have a love-hate relationship with social media. Around May 2025 I was basically asked to leave my job and at the time I basically cut myself off from the world.

I don't have a LinkedIn anymore. I deactivated most of my social media one by one. I think the only one I kept was Instagram, and even then I completely stopped posting to it.

When I was younger — no, not that young, okay maybe like in my 20s — I had this feeling of wanting to uproot my life, travel across the world to a place where I didn't know anyone and no one knew me, and just start all over. I heard there was a term for it — geographic suicide.

I guess I wanted to somewhat do something like that online. Just up and destroy all my online profile. Which I kind of did.

This brings me back to my love hate relationship with social media. Because, you see, I hate social media for the performative dance a lot of people play. For doing things “for the 'gram.” Or because someone's personality is a thinly-veiled excuse for affiliate marketing.

The love part is because I live in a time where I can share stuff that I genuinely find cool, or I care about, with people who also love that kind of stuff. The intent matters a lot, and I've always tried to lean into posting stuff because I think it'll benefit their life in some way, even if it's just for a laugh.

For a bit I tried to follow the advice of people online when trying to hop back on to social media. Find my niche. Have a hook. Build your brand. But oh my God, that's still performative. Plus I don't have a niche. Have you seen my life? On one hand, I talk about debugging random network issues. On the other, I like to talk about my dog. How do you fit those into a niche?

So finally, after many false starts, I figured fuck it.

I'll write whatever the fuck I want and share it because it's cool to me and if people like that then that's good. Screw the best guidebook or trying to fit into a niche or whatever.

I guess this also means I'm finally returning from being absolutely dead on the Internet again? Okay.

Nice to meet you all. I'm Muki. This is my blog.