Anonymity Online

Once again, I return to crystal-blue with after several weeks of silence. One of the things that’s been slightly putting me off blogging is the slight loss of anonymity assocaited with recently linking the URL to a domain I use for Mastodon. I am not under any delusions of grandeur - I’m very aware that this is an exercise for myself only and I’ve had, cumulatively, ten non-bot visits in the last thirty days (does Cloudflare count your own visits? Have I visited my own blog ten times this past month? It certainly doesn’t feel like it…) and so it’s not really something I should let myself get put off by. And yet, there is something about knowing someone might write your posts and form opinions on them that is ever-so-slightly off-putting.

Simultaneously, the reason I blogged rather than writing a journal was that the knowledge that someone might read has a certain affect on your output. There was also the technical aspect, of course, of foraying into self-hosting and Hugo and static blogs. I’ve enjoyed putting together this blog and in the process, learnt about copy-left and various other licening options. I’ve since began renting a small VPS where I self-host SearXNG, Mastodon, and have since decided, despite initial ambitions, to keep this blog on Cloudflare. It seems there is little advantage yet lots of faff in moving a static blog to a sparsely resourced VPS.

Normally, I find that once I begin typing, I easily have several paragraphs of commentary. This evening, I am pre-occupied watching my spouse vacuum up some ants…?

Who knows what our when our next post shall be?

— Frost