Publish Here First

I write on my own domain first. After that, copies go out to Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky, Matrix and wherever else people are reading, and each copy points back to the original on my domain.

The practice has a name, POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I run it on hardware I pay for because I got tired of losing things. Google Reader shut down in 2013 and took ten years of my subscriptions with it. Posterous, Vine and Google+ went the same way. In 2023 Twitter priced its API out of reach, and within a week every third-party client I used had stopped working.

I couldn't have prevented any of that. What I can decide is where the original copy sits, and I keep it here.

Why bother

The domain is the only part of this that is mine.

Every platform I have used changed the deal at some point: the ranking, the terms, or the company itself. More than once I watched reach that took years to build come apart in an afternoon.

With a domain, if a host annoys me I move the files. The URLs keep working, old links still resolve, and feed subscribers stay subscribed without having to be told about the move.

I like the fediverse and I like Nostr. The people I care about are spread over five protocols that barely talk to each other, and syndication is how I reach them. I just won't let any of those protocols hold the only copy.

What I hold myself to

Five rules, kept short so I remember them.

  1. The original gets a URL on a domain I own before it goes anywhere else.
  2. Every syndicated copy links back here, including the ones nobody will click.
  3. If a platform disappears tonight, the conversation there goes with it. The work stays here.
  4. Nothing lives only inside a silo, not even the posts that seem unimportant. I have guessed wrong about those before.
  5. Backups stay boring, and I restore from them often enough to know they work.
The proof

These are the services behind the rules above. I administer every machine they run on, and everything is live unless the line says otherwise.

The hub

ActivityPub

Nostr

  • murad.rocks my own relay, Blossom media, and the NIP-05 that verifies me
  • nostr.murad.rocks nostrudel, self-hosted so the client is mine too

AT Protocol

Matrix

Longer form

  • murad.world a forum for threads that outlive a timeline coming soon
  • skull.black private Usenet over NNTP, because text ages well

Feeds

  • rss.expert a small HTTP service for feeds; the same URL answers a terminal and a browser
  • pablo.news short notes, posted here first

Code

Shared systems

These are not syndication targets. They apply the same idea to other people: each member gets a real Unix account and a place of their own to keep things.

  • noctem.cafe pubnix on OpenBSD, running on a machine in my house
  • noctem9.cafe the same thing on Plan 9, for anyone who wants the strange one
  • runv.club Brazilian tilde community: an SSH account, a personal page, IRC
The metal

This is the hardware I pay for and administer, the one the manifesto talks about.

The rack

The home lab rack, machines stacked bare without cases
the rack, such as it is

It grew one machine at a time, without a plan, and about half of it is equipment someone else would have thrown out.

Nyx runs Unraid and holds most of the storage: Ryzen 7 5800X, 128 GB of RAM, a Radeon RX 7600, and a long list of containers. Kaiser runs Proxmox on two Xeon E5-2686 v4, which adds up to 36 cores and 72 threads with about 128 GB of RAM. It gets anything that needs virtual machines and is in no hurry.

Khan is a Beelink on Debian. Calisto is a Dell OptiPlex 9020, Core i5, 32 GB. Forsaken is a Pentium G2030 that should have been retired years ago and still runs Debian in the rack. Routing and firewall sit on a dedicated pfSense box, Ryzen 5 4600G with 32 GB.

Below them is a shelf of paperback-sized boards: an Intel NUC, a ZimaBoard 432, an Orange Pi 3B, an Orange Pi CM4 and an Orange Pi Zero 2W. They run proxies, gateways and monitoring, jobs that have to stay on and barely use a CPU core.

I prefer reusing hardware. An old machine that stays up for three years is worth more to me than a fast one I have to babysit.

Where the work happens

Hesse and Poe, two desktop workstations
Hesse and Poe

Hesse is an ASRock X870E Taichi Lite with a Ryzen 9 9950X, 16 cores and 32 threads, 192 GB of RAM and an RTX 5090. Its 5 GbE Realtek card moves files to my own servers fast enough that self-hosting feels ordinary. An LG ultrawide and a 5 TB WD Elements sit next to it.

Poe is an ASRock B660M Phantom Gaming 4 with a Core i9-14900K, 24 cores and 32 threads, 128 GB of Kingston across four sticks, and an RTX 5070. What it has most of is disk: about 9.3 TB local, with 7.7 TB still free.

Kamerad, the portable workstation
Kamerad

Kamerad is the workstation I can carry. An Avell Storm 570 TI on Windows 11 Pro, Core Ultra 9 275HX, 96 GB, RTX 5070 Ti Laptop, a 2 TB Kingston NVMe and 2.5 GbE wired. It does the same work as the desktops when I am away from the desk.

MSI Pulse 16 laptop
MSI Pulse 16

The MSI Pulse 16 AI C1V runs Fedora with 96 GB of DDR5, the most its two slots accept. It gets the containers and compiles that are too heavy for a thin laptop.

Dell XPS 13, one of the two
Dell XPS 13, one of two

Two 2023 Dell XPS 13, both on Fedora, are the ones that travel. They weigh almost nothing in a bag and have what I need to write, code and administer the servers from a hotel. When I leave the house I take one of these, even though I own much faster machines.

MacBook Pro
MacBook Pro

A 2025 MacBook Pro with an M5 gets the least use. I keep it for testing things on macOS.