Format Change

If you have visited this site before, it probably looks familiar enough. There is still a big gradient across the top of an otherwise unremarkable site hosting a long archive of infrequent opinions. Underneath, the rendering engine has moved from Ghost Pro to Astro, but migrating from blogging engines is a dance I do on a regular basis and rarely something I even mention anymore.

The bigger change is something the site no longer does: it no longer speaks ActivityPub, and with that change marks the end of an era for me. Astro provides no actor, no way to follow this site from Mastodon, and nothing delivered into anyone’s timeline.

Why is that important?

When I began shutting down vmst.io, I wanted an independent place to keep talking to the people it had affected, so I migrated the followers of my Mastodon account to Ghost as @vmstan@vmstan.com. That made the Notes feature of Ghost my home in the Fediverse, and it meant people who had followed me there and on mastodon.technology before that could keep following me without having to find me again.

Closing vmst.io was about the cost, risk, and responsibility of operating a public social service. Leaving the Fediverse is a larger and more personal decision. After four years as an administrator, it has run its course for me. My entire identity there was built on being a Mastodon administrator, contributor, and advocate, and in the absence of all that, I don’t find myself with a lot to say.

With the change in platforms, all of those federated relationships have been purposefully abandoned.

This is part of why the Whois page got the biggest visible change in this move. It is now a proper directory of the places I actually exist online, organized by purpose instead of a long row of icons. That matters more now that the server is gone: profiles come and go, but this site is the one place I control, where the current list can always live.

🖖, Fediverse.