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About this Website

Welcome to my website

If you're reading this then you're viewing a website hosted on a Synology NAS stuck in up in my loft, running a piece of software called Kiki.

There are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to do this, many of them very good ones. But there are also some pretty good reasons why I wanted to do it. And in this section of the website I'm going to run through those reasons and give you my thoughts on the whole self-hosted Kiki experience.

I'll also attempt to write a how-to guide for anyone else who would like to give it a try. Throughout all of this, please bear in mind that this is basically me:

I'm happy for people to ask me questions about this set up, but please don't be surprised if my best response is "I dunno". I'm mostly just fumbling around in the dark, being constantly surprised that any of this is actually working.

Onto the Next Section: Why Kiki?

Why Kiki?

Tags: kiki

Author: KickingK

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...