Self-Hosting Again
A few years ago I had some web hosting and my own domain, and was running a fairly elaborate personal wiki with a lot of stuff on it. In 2021 I lost my job, moved in with my then-partner-now-spouse, and got a new job that paid half as much. Needless to say, unnecessary expenses had to be put on hold for awhile. I'm still technically a temporary employee (holding out for those sweet sweet bennies) but the terms of my contract changed such that I'm now making something closer to a living wage. We're finally caught up with all the payments we were behind on, so I have a tiny bit of discretionary income. I'm trying to avoid too much "lifestyle inflation", since our country and economy are being torn apart by a nascent fascist regime and I don't know if I'll ever feel like things are truly stable again, but I liked having my own web zone, neocities wasn't really cutting it, and since I deleted my facebook account after they started cozying up to said regime, I wanted a central location where people could find all the ways to contact me and places I exist on the internet, so mattbee.zone was born. Yes, "Matt Bee" is my actual human name, or at least it will be after I finalize all the paperwork. The "bee" stands for bluelander, you see. Also my former government name. It's all very sensible.
What is self-hosting?
I say "self hosting", but I'm not actually running a web server out of my home. I think most people who use the term are renting a VPS somewhere and running all their own services, but I don't want to be that hands on, so I'm just paying for webhosting with some basic processes and database access. I mean "self-hosting" in a more philosophical sense, i.e. not relying on any big commercial platforms. Creating my own space on the internet, to whatever extent that's possible. After all, no one is ever really completely free from corporate oversight. Even if I were running my own hardware, I'd be at the mercy of my ISP. If I were renting a VPS, it'd be at the mercy of Amazon or Microsoft or whatever big bucket the provider uses. This is unfortunately unavoidable, unless I want to move my presence to the dark web. Which I'm hoping won't become necessary, but one never knows.
Platforms vs. carriers
My hosting provider is NearlyFreeSpeech, who I've used before and had a great experience with. I'm not 100% on board with their libertarian approach to content moderation—they're willing to host some heinous shit, and won't even proactively remove illegal content without a court order or law enforcement request. But they don't provide discoverability for the heinous shit they host: there's no NFS feed people can follow that gives them algorithmic recommendations for whatever hate speech and reactionary poison they're into, which in my mind makes them more of a neutral carrier like the phone company than a platform like Twitter or Facebook. Should the phone companies be proactively rooting out and blocking nazi communications? That's a tough one. I despise fascism in all forms, but I don't really think they should. There's no doubt that nazis use the phone (and encrypted networks like signal and telegram) to communicate and organize, but so do antifascists activists, leftist organizers and marginalized groups. It's important that the latter always have free, open communication channels that are resistant to government intrusion. If that means you have to make your service available to nazis, that's an unfortunate reality that must be accepted, as long as they're not actively amplifying those voices. Corporate platforms like youtube and facebook are a thousand times more responsible than NFSN or signal for mainstreaming fascist ideology, despite any ostensible moderation policies they have or once had.
A linktree alternative
The first thing I wanted to host was some sort of "linktree-like" page. I could make a simple list of hyperlinks in about 5 minutes, but I wanted something a bit sleeker and more modern, but I didn't want to build all the CSS myself. I first became aware that self-hosted linktree alternatives were a thing when Ray Barnholt talked about using one on No More Whoppers, so I went to rdbaaa.space to see what he uses, which is a very elaborate software package called Linkstack. This isn't just a tool to build a page of links, it's for rolling your own linktree-like service. It uses a mastodon-like "instances" paradigm, with linksta.cc being the "flagship instance". I created an account but I knew I wouldn't stick with it for long, mostly because I wanted a URL I can say aloud, and these URL hacks are no good in the real world. "Linkstah dot see see"? I'm not saying that.
So once I had my own webspace I tried installing it, but I was way in over my head. It's a huge over-engineered mess of PHP and JavaScript. The package size is grotesque, nearly 85MB of uncompressed data. It has icons for every website imaginable, but they're tiny SVG files, <1k apiece. It had some background images for different themes, but a shocking amount of the package size is code. The instructions said I just needed to upload it to my server and load index.php to start the installation process, but nothing worked, I kept getting a 500 internal server error. I created a test.html file, and that wouldn't load. I figured out that the problem is with the .htaccess file Linkstack comes with that's supposed to make everything work. It was doing the opposite. I'm not about to learn how to debug apache configuration syntax for a webpage with a list of links, so I scrapped it and started looking for other options.
One websearch later, I found littlelink. It's 2MB. It's just HTML and CSS. It works beautifully. I do not understand why Linkstack exists. The whole point of a site like linktree is so people don't have to mess with code to make a simple website. If the pitch is "be your own linktree", they should keep the amount of messing with code to a minimum. Easily hackable, straightforward, documented HTML and CSS templates are a million times more friendly than software that requires tinkering with .htaccess and setting up databases. I guess Linkstack is for people who want to set up their own service for other people to sign up and use? More power to anyone who wants to do that, I guess. I don't see the point.
A guestbook
When I was hosting my site on Neocities, I had a simple guestbook set up on a site called smartgb.com. It had an incredibly unwieldy URL, which involved a .php and a bunch of letters and numbers. It's fine, but it's a slightly sketchy vibe. It seems like the kind of site that might show people ads at some point. Also, it has a counter displaying how many times the guestbook was viewed, which isn't something I want. I figured it'd be pretty simple to self-host a replacement. I found simple guestbook, which is exactly what it says on the tin. I'm using it almost as-is out of the box; I had to fix a couple relative URL paths to be absolute, since the guestbook lives in a subfolder on my website. I changed the captcha from a math problem to a question that's easier for humans. I have it prompt people for a website or name, since the guestbook doesn't have a dedicated URL field. I added a note to not include any line breaks in the message, since the script displays these as \n without parsing them correctly. It had a few bugs with characters that need to be escaped, but I can go into the database and fix any errors for now. It's not perfect, but it's adequate for the moment. If you're reading this and you feel like signing the guestbook, click here!
A self-hosted blog?
I don't have any plans to switch to a self-hosted blog at the moment. I like bearblog, I like the convenience of being able to write and post entries on my phone. If I self-host, I'll be tempted to use a static site generator like 11ty, which means I'd go from updating rarely to updating never, because the SSG workflow is too much friction and I can't do it on a phone. It'd be nice if there was a self-hostable CGI blog CMS for normal people, but as Cathode Ray Dude has eloquently written about, that's not really a thing. He has a detailed write-up about beating dokuwiki into a blog-like shape, and if anything ever happens to bearblog I might grudgingly go that route. Or heck it, maybe I'll go back to Odd Muse. It's 2025, what better time to go all-in on perl?
The Future
That's pretty much it. I copied over my site from Neocities as-is, hopefully fixing all the parts where I used relative file paths when I should've used absolute. I might tinker with some basic PHP apps, maybe bring back my contact form. I can't picture myself rolling my own fediverse instance or anything. Even gotosocial is more than I have the time or spoons to deal with. Or the money, honestly. It's fine, I don't need to be the critter who does that. I have a nice little webzone to call mine, I'm happy 🦝