This blog has a new home. After years on WordPress shared hosting, it now runs on self-hosted infrastructure. Ghost on a VPS I manage, backed up to encrypted offsite storage, federated via ActivityPub.
The name is new too. "Techverständiger" served its purpose, but it was always more job description than identity. "Do Flamingos Know They're Pink" is a better question. It's the kind of question I keep circling back to: how much do we understand about the systems we're embedded in? Do the tools we build shape us in ways we can't see from the inside? Flamingos aren't born pink, they become pink gradually due to their diet.
What this blog is about
This blog will continue to be what it's always been, a documentation of my journey, interests, and all the places my work and advocacy have brought me. At its core, it's about the interrogation of technology, the systems around it, and how technology helps and harms. Some posts are policy analysis: regulation, digital sovereignty, the economics of open source. Some are technical narratives: debugging sessions, infrastructure decisions, the gap between documentation and reality. Some are rants. Some are fiction.
The common thread in my life is that I don't think technology itself is the interesting part of what I do. What's interesting is what technology does to people, institutions, and power structures. The code is incidental. The consequences are the story.
Autonomy Tuesdays
Starting next week, I'm publishing a series called the Autonomous Stack. It documents a project I've been working on for the past few months: migrating my entire digital life from proprietary services to self-hosted, open-source infrastructure.
The series runs weekly on Tuesdays. Many of the posts are drafted already, covering everything from the initial inventory, through email migration, photo import, home lab deployment, and the steps it takes to self-host services that are reliable enough to daily drive. A lot has changed since I first started self-hosting two decades ago.
It's not a tutorial, but the posts are honest about what went wrong, what cost more time than expected, and what trade-offs were made. If you've ever thought about self-hosting but wondered what the actual experience is like, not the deployment guide that ends at docker-compose up but the weeks of preparation, debugging, and documentation that surround that command, this is for you. I'll also use it as a vehicle to explore the big picture topics I talk about already and ground them in personal examples. The code is personal, and the personal is political. It will also explore pragmatism vs. ideology, a tension that runs through the whole project.
What hasn't changed
The tagline stays: another internet is possible. I still believe that, and it continues to drive me, and the migration makes it more concrete. I will not mince words, the world is incredibly bleak at the moment. If I didn't believe a different one is possible, I wouldn't be doing any of this. The infrastructure I'm writing about is the infrastructure this blog runs on. I'm practicing what I preach with renewed vigor and with greater consequences when I get them wrong. Just yesterday I thought I wouldn't be able to publish this blog because of a Ghost issue, but that was resolved.
Welcome. There's a lot to talk about.
This is part of the Autonomous Stack series, documenting my migration from proprietary services to self-hosted infrastructure.
Next week: Why I'm Doing This (stay tuned).