Welcome to the Fediverse

The Homelab Files has joined the Fediverse!!

Joining the Fediverse

The Homelab Files is now on the Fediverse. You can find it at @[email protected], or open it directly at https://md.thehomelabfiles.org/@blog. This allows us to notify and expose our content via the Fediverse in a way that we hope makes consuming it convenient, as well as sidestepping concerns of algorithmic suppression or counter-narrative stomping.

Why This Matters

It is indisputable that many platforms modulate viewpoints. Nothing is more dangerious. Couple that with engineered narratives that obscure the truth and honest reality breaks. A handful of companies, often pressured by governments, now sit between a writer and a reader, a podcaster and a listener, a video and its audience. This arrangement is presented as convenience; it is nothing of the sort. It is custody and control. An account can be closed, a reach can be quietly reduced, a topic can be labeled, and the person on the other end is given no recourse and no explanation. When the pipe is owned by the people who also decide what flows through it, "free speech" becomes a policy they revise whenever it costs them something.

These are the entities who bring to life terms like malinformation.

Decentralized communication is the corrective. Not a different platform - the same idea the internet was built on. Independent servers, speaking a common protocol, each with its own rules and its own owner(s). Nobody has to like the arrangement. Nobody has to approve my account, and I do not have to approve theirs. That is what a commons looks like when it is working.

Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?

Making It Available To You

We want the content to be reachable by as many people as possible, in whatever way they already consume things.

The Fediverse is not one website. You do not need an account on my server. You do not need an account on any particular server. If you already use Mastodon, GoToSocial, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Friendica, or one of the publishing tools that speak ActivityPub, paste the address into your search field and follow from there. Your feed stays yours, in the client you already use, next to the people you already follow.

And if none of that appeals, nothing here changes for you. The blog stays where it is, readable without a login. This is an addition, not a migration.

On Algorithms and Narrative

We have no interest in competing for a ranked slot from a tech deity. When you follow this account, you see what gets posted, in the order it gets posted. There is no auction deciding whether it reaches you, no model deciding it is off-message, no throttling of a link because it points off-platform. If the material is not for you, unfollow - that is a cleaner mechanism than being quietly filtered and never told.

We will not pretend the Fediverse is free of argument or bad actors. It is a room full of people, and rooms full of people are messy. But messy and open beats tidy and controlled ... any day ... every day.

What Does Not Change

The Blog is still home to prose.
Videos stay on YouTube.
GitHub still holds the assets.