Why Kiki?

Before we get to that, let's start with another question:

Why Self Host?

Short answer: Because I wanted something that was mine.

I've posted so much content online over the past thirty years and almost all of it has now gone. For various reasons: forums shut down, companies enshittify, mods turn out to be Gamergaters, the whole site turns into a fascist hell-hole etc, etc. I just want something that I can call my own, some weird little place I can plonk my stuff.

Technically, I don't need to self host to be able to do that. I was on Micro.blog for a while and that was...fine, I guess. But paying for a company to use their service carries two pressures for me.

Firstly, there's pressure to use the service how it was intended. I feel the need to use it in a certain way. Consequently, it can never feel like mine.

Secondly, there's pressure to actually use the damned thing. If I'm paying money for something, I need to use it regularly to justify that expense. But that's not how my hobbyist brain works. I might obsess over something for three months and then not touch it again for a year, before picking it up once more and taking it in an entirely different direction.

If something is free or if it's something I own, I can do that. If it's a service that I'm paying for, I'm just going to cancel my subscription at some point during that fallow year.

Why Synology?

Because I have one.

That's it. I'm using the tools that I have available.

Well, there's a little bit more too it than that. I really love my Synology set up. The Diskstation operating system makes it really easy to do stuff that's really bloody fiddly on a regular Linux system. It's a well designed GUI that makes it relatively simple to do powerful things. Which is literally what a well designed computer system is supposed to do.

So, Why Kiki?

Why not Wordpress?

Why not Ghost?

Why not Drupal?

Why not code your own html?

Aaaaargh! I don't know. It all looks so...too bloody much. Too complicated, too powerful, too much to learn, too much to do, too many decisions.

But mostly, it's serendipity. I first heard about Kiki on Mastodon. I think it was re-posted into my timeline by Adam Newbold, the creator of omg.lol. I read up about it on the creators website and it sounded like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

To be finished...