Ciao Fedi, I love you <3

My Fediverse journey has been great. Running a small Mastodon server, migrating to GoToSocial, and all the interesting interactions and discoveries I made will remain fond memories of the good things we can do with digital tools.

Nevertheless, I've decided to decommission my instance and its associated domain gts.harvestntech.fr to focus on this blog. It will remain my sole space online to express myself and share how we live life, cultivate the land, and play with digital tools.

Time is life, life is time

My activity on the Fedi was essentially personal. Of course, I shared what Tristan and I were doing together, but my profile was clearly in my name and its content was absolutely not accessible to Tristan. The Fediverse is very abstract, as concrete as the tools and materials that make it work... and rather than spending time teaching him about this yet another digital universe, and especially, rather than continuing to spend time on the Fedi by myself, I simply chose to stop this activity.

Of course, we don't share all our passions. You'll never see Tristan playing video games, for example. I think we already have a good balance between time spent together (sports, our micro-farm, going out...) and time spent on our individual hobbies (him with animals & plants, me with video games & reading). But I'm really keen to increase the time we spend together as much as possible and stop letting that time be taken up, especially by the Fedi.

Do less but better

Along the same lines, the advantage of our domain names (www.loicrobert.fr, www.tristandelamare.fr & www.harvestntech.fr), all linked to this blog and our email addresses, is that they are "permanent" while messaging services and other social networks come and go. You should, in theory, always be able to find something that connects us from the digital world to the real world through the domains and the blog, so I want to take better care of them.

Tristan is involved with the blog, even though he doesn't write articles. He often asks me to grab the camera so we can post something. He corrects names and explanations, and he suggests ideas. We really like how it's going, so we'll keep doing it this way.

On my end, I handle its maintenance, and while I admit that the comfort of Ghost's visual editor, the beautiful, clean, ready-made theme, and the administration tools are great, I'm aiming to simplify all of that, like many other geeks: I want to get rid of the database and administration for something more streamlined. Even if I have to get my hands dirty to get everything started, I'll migrate to Markdown editing with a tool like Zola or Hugo sometime soon.

Less digital, more real life

Which explains the illustration I chose for this article: Oups, our dog. He just turned 7, which means he's probably already lived half his life <3 Since we rescued him from a terrible situation that ruined the first 3 years of his existence, he's never been better. I mean, he gets his morning run with me every day (he's way more excited about it than I am, by the way :p); he's made tons of animal and human friends; he has plenty of space to sniff around and stretch his legs on our acre of land; he eats well, sleeps well, gets cuddles all day long; and even though he's still grumpy with strangers, if they bother to let him bark at them, they might just become one of his best friends for life.

So all that time I was spending on Fedi, I'll now spend doing even more cuddles with Oups, holding my Tristan's hand longer, taking care of our garden, spending time with our loved ones, reading, sleeping, eating, playing, learning... in the real world with my feet even more firmly planted on the ground.