domain name
domain name
i don’t like spending money often, except for food really but that seems quite obvious. it’s a chore to manage what you’re spending money on and with subscription services being forced down your throat now it takes like two auto-renewed free trials to be made bankrupt. i pirate all of my software and entertainment as much as possible (or use shit that other people pay for) just so I don’t have to worry about wasting money on something so stupid and single-use as a 6/10 movie or video game. i’ll still drop 15 dollars on a domain name and a new attempt for a hobby at like three in the morning tho, just because.
domain names are deceptively cheap, or at least they are to me because I can just drop ten dollars on a domain name, watch it get seized by the registry for the rest of time due to some WHOIS shit and not really care. i mean it’s just a domain name, anyone can afford them! unless you’re paypigging for some premium domain or attaching it to the registrar’s 50 different web host services because you’re bad at finding good deals, it’s cheaper than a cup of coffee or whatever bad analogy computer people use to justify the transaction to themselves. that’s how I felt when I configured this entire blog in the middle of the night, actively refreshing my banking app to see the real price after the currency exchanges and taxes finish doing their thing. i mean it’s not that bad, i’ve spent money on much more stupid things at way worse prices, plus I've actually got some savings unlike last time so you shouldn’t be bitching about how you’re financially ruined from a domain name of all things, xiè.
indie web
i don’t know about you, but when I think about “indieweb” or “micropub” or running one of those minimalist interconnected blogging websites where the only limit is your imagination and how much time you want to spend reading specification documents, I think of washed up millennials micro-celebs floating around, waiting for their long-gone period of cultural domination to come back. but i mean, who doesn’t?
people don’t blog anymore, they’re all on social media platforms with hundreds of millions of users actively lurking, running these giant mobile apps and algorithms that can deduce your T cell count from how you like a post. even the millennials have their own hyper-personalized social media for themselves with bluesky, being able to have a second chance with that feeling of what it was like to control mass media while also being able to argue over the most inconsequential shit ever. “real websites” don’t exist anymore, it’s all about link lists that move you between different platforms. there’s still a place for blogging though, it’s just right over there in that poorly lit cave with a sign that says “the loserdom live here”.
what I'm trying to get at through all of this wordslop nonsense about how millennials are cringe and old, unlike us chad zoomers that are cool and awesome is that nobody wants to set up a full website that fits the correct stack of supporting all the indieweb technologies and third-party platforms just so they can have a homepage to type shit out and share it with their friends, with maybe a little bit of communication between their blogs. all people want is a text box that can share their unfiltered thoughts to the internet, no need to pay money and configure some nerd shit to make it look cool... without some exceptions of course (CSS that was probably taken from a template and lightly modified).
what do people (me) want out of a blog now? a platform, really. i guess that’s the reason people still buy domain names now, it gives them a professional look, a static archive where you can go to for that person’s stuff. everybody wants that, so is that the real reward for spending money on a string of text? i guess, that’s probably why I bought one and spent extra to link it to the publishing platform. i mean it’s whatever, the deal’s already been done for almost a full day as of when I’m typing this. no refunds, and certainly no warranty.
either way, I got shit to do and this isn't worth worrying about at all.