joke.enterprises

work in progress

this is the new, refactored blog page im currently working on, the old one with the articles it had can be found here, i might migrate the old articles over to here at some point though

29/01/2026 - Back Up Again

And we're back!

yeah, after saying i'd write more in 2025 i didn't end up writing anything and then my site was down for a bit. lol

the not writing bit was mainly laziness, but the site going down was because the ancient box i was hosting it on decided to shit the bed and stopped booting for whatever reason. i moved house recently and so i've got a more permanent little server box that lives here now, which is where this site currently lives

you might also notice that most of the old blog posts are gone, this is because i haven't ripped the old blog posts off the old server's hdd yet (haven't actually got any spare sata cables to read them with annoyingly...), i'll get around to doing this at some point and they should be reinstated, the actual website was just cloned off the github, which i purposefully set up to not include any of the blog content, glad that came in handy!

as i'm writing this i'm currently attempting to get ipv4 sorted so i can properly selfhost, turns out hyperoptic want you to pay extra or they'll put you behind cgnat. ugh

anyway, i have a load of stuff i wanna write about this year so maybe this year will be the year i actually write properly, we'll see! i think i really need to get a good setup for images on the blog too for a couple articles i wanna write

EDIT: this was originally written 25/01/2026, my ISP took like 4 days to actually give my a static IPV4, but now i have it. YAY!

10/01/2026 - Social Media Thoughts

I logged out of my twitter the other day, I don't think that's particularly uncommon at this point, it's absolutely just a cesspit now and apparently the UK government want to ban it for the shit with grok, which I can't massively blame them for.

I probably should've logged out of twitter earlier but the issue with twitter is that it's *really funny*, most people on twitter these days are the real cream of the crop when it comes to post-ironic posting, everyone's about 50 layers deep into some bit, constantly trying to bait people, etc etc. It's really fun to watch as a passive spectator until inevitably you become a participant in it, at which point you'll slowly get pushed into the same bitter irony poisoning as everyone else, it's a little bit grim!

So apart from the negatives there, why leave? Mainly on account of remembering Cohost!

Cohost was cool. Cohost was a social media site that came out mid-2022 with like, 3 devs that was trying to be an Actually Good social media site that didn't focus on engagement, so no native app, no ads, no algorithm (posts were categorised by tags, your timeline was just the most recent posts from every tag and user you followed, there was no public stats for posts other than number of comments

Fundamentally I think cohost was probably really unsustainable, it was literally 3 developers (no project manager!!!) with a big investment trying to survive purely off subscriptions on their highly niche social media site that was trying as hard as it could to not poke your dopamine receptors, to be active on cohost I think you really did need to like it to an extent

Thinking about this was the main reason I didn't really wanna use twitter anymore, twitter is entirely about being funny and so if you click on someone's profile it's basically impossible to garner much about who they are, vs cohost where you could click someone's profile and see a load of blog posts and detailed thoughts on stuff they actually care about. Microblogging sucks.

Not having social media kinda sucks though! Since cohost died I've not been able to find anything quite like it, but being able to find new people through social media in general is fun! Sometimes you get to yap with people you've never met before and meeting new people is fun in general! Not living under a rock is nice too, it's nice to have like, any connection to the wider world.

Realistically the solution to this is to meet more people IRL which is always better than meeting them online *anyway*, but meeting new people in person is difficult, the best way to do it is to organise events online but that then becomes an advertising problem, which then just wraps around to having to do social media stuff.

For the online side of stuff, the "indie web" as people call it is probably the closest to what I want, so personal websites, blogs, etc, I love browsing them but they can be a little hard to find. Typically people promote them on social media (which requires being on social media. again), or people linking to their friend's sites via webrings, which is nice but generally webrings don't go on super long before you're out of people.

I think some way to promote personal websites via some central site dedicated to it, or maybe to specific niches would be cool, but I suppose the issue with that is that at a certain point it's just social media :p if it was kept low-scope it could work though

One thing I've thought about doing is making a little noticeboard near where I live for people to promote their little websites, which I think is a pretty cool idea as long as it doesn't get defaced.

Anyway, don't have any sort of conclusion to this, in 2026 I'm hoping to work on my blog again (said that last year :p), go to more arcades (i'll see about writing a blog post about arcade rhythm games at some point) and in general I wanna be a part of and organise more little communities to meet people in, maybe play some melee too :v

Oh, I have a bluesky now too! check it out! I find the culture on there is actually pretty nice depending on who you follow and it isn't super corporate which is nice.

17/02/2025 - test

test post. hello world!