The small web at scale

Awhile back, I moved this site to blot.im. I wanted to see if it was possible to still publish a blog on the IndieWeb that wasn’t entirely beholden to the free tier of big tech. And it basically worked. For four bucks a month, I was able to host the static site I built on my computer by syncing it to blot via git.

But the system was never perfect. The initial load time for my site was almost two seconds, which isn’t the end of the world since I still consider my site to be an RSS first design. If that was the only tradeoff, I could live with it.

The biggest issue is that the sole proprietor of blot would often disappear for weeks and then months. As a European, I’m all for long, disconnected holidays. But these require transparency, planning, and contingency plans. During this time support issues would pile up. Git stopped syncing for a day, then randomly restarted.

The alternatives aren’t great. The more independent services still have the one-person problem, others are too technical for me, while the less technical ones don’t allow for the sort of customization I’d like.

Which brought me back to GitHub Pages. For the same four bucks a month I was paying for blot, I can publish multiple static sites. My load time is a fraction of second.

GitHub is very much not the small, IndieWeb I’d prefer. But it’s easy to use, reliable, and having a modern CDN makes for much more reasonable load times. For now, these are tradeoffs I’m willing to make.