Well, here's my first ever participation in the IndieWeb Carnival, which is ridiculous since I've had several months to participate by now and I write, like, nearly every day (this is what I mean by bad executive functioning). This month's topic is love letters hosted by Juha-Matti Santala, which is a wonderful theme.

So, what am I writing a love letter to? Rasagy Sharma already did a wonderful post on the IndieWeb Club (yet another community participation I haven't gotten around to!) A few months ago, I wrote a love letter to public transit.

I guess I should start with an interesting fact and a confession. There's a construct in psychology called emophilia, which is described as falling in love fast and easily. I resonate deeply with this—I feel as though I fall in love with everyone I meet. Not just that, though, when I'm introduced to a new, really good piece of software or service or website, I feel the same! There is so much in the world to care for and deeply appreciate.

Maybe I should lean into that—why only pick one particular thing, anyways?!

So here's what I've decided: everything. Or at least everything I've been grateful for while I write. Which turns out to be a lot. This essay is going to meander, the way love does. I'm going to name names, thank strangers, gush at infrastructure. A love letter to the invisible labour that holds my little corner of the Internet together, to tools that are extensions of thought, and to the people who reached out across the void and made a neighbourhood.

My Hosting

Let me start with the most dry, nerdy thing possible: infrastructure. Hurray! Despite all of its flaws, I'm deeply appreciative of Netlify, where I'm currently hosting 60 projects (I can host 500 in total simultaneously, holy smokes), using around 100GB of bandwidth monthly, along with millions of web requests, dozens of forms, and hours of build time. All for free.

Anybody in tech (or elsewhere, really) will tell you nothing is free, and that you are the product, etc., but I am certainly not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I'm sure the day will come when my legacy plan will be null and void, and I'll have to migrate dozens of my projects and pay a pretty penny in the process. But today is not that day!

Unix-like Operating Systems Maintainers

I began using CrunchBang #! over fifteen years ago when the desktop I bought off of Kijiji for $35 mysteriously could no longer boot up Windows in any capacity. I am so grateful for that.

I love the terminal, the cursor slow-blinking at you like a cat. I was a teenager when I first booted Linux off a USB drive into a world more mine. The desktop was spare and dark. A panel at the top. Conky stats glowing in the corner, a vital-signs readout for the machine itself. The fan hummed.

What I've only come to understand slowly, over fifteen years of troubleshooting and mailing lists and forum rabbit holes is that this world is maintained by only a handful of humans. The Linux kernel has thousands of contributors in its git history, but the critical path runs through a much smaller number of people. Subsystem maintainers who review patches, catch regressions, and shepherd code. Greg Kroah-Hartman, for example, maintains the stable kernel branch that most of the world's production servers actually run alone.

The same is true of the BSD family—FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, each stewarded by volunteer teams who move with care. The unglamorous work that everything else depends on.

I am so grateful for the hours and days of troubleshooting I've struggled through all these years. I have learned so many valuable skills, both technical and non-technical. Patience, the importance of free and open sharing, coming to realize expertise isn't a credential but a practice.

Countless tonnes of e-waste are saved by the ability to boot a USB of a lightweight distro onto an otherwise abandoned machine. Every time I ssh into a server, every time a hospital runs its imaging software, every time a spacecraft sends telemetry across the solar system—it's all running on this gift. A decades-long gift from strangers who decided the commons mattered. You build for the community, not for yourself. The work is the offering. Miigwech.

Independent Project Maintainers

If an operating system is the land, software is the shelter people build on it. And shelter, it turns out, is also largely held together by volunteers. People who decided that a thing should exist and kept deciding that year after year.

I'm grateful that my IDE of choice, Sublime Text, still exists as it has for the past decade. No genAI features in sight. Every tool is racing to stuff a chatbot into its sidebar, and the restraint of Sublime Text is wonderful. It opens instantly. It stays out of your way. It trusts you to know what you're doing.

Although I've never used the Zed IDE, I'm also grateful for Gram, as an example of a no-genAI fork that was created when Zed introduced genAI features. There are those who care enough to fork the project, strip out the parts they found objectionable, and maintain the alternative. You can view many other examples here.

omg.lol is something in particular I'm incredibly grateful for. Adam Newbold is single-handedly responsible for creating the infrastructure for a smaller, human, kind web. My original article covering the platform is my most popular post on Medium ever.

If it wasn't for omg.lol, I wouldn't be here writing to you right now, because I only began my brennan.day project because I started a blog on weblog.lol, omg.lol's blogging service, and found it didn't have enough functionality for me. And so I moved to building my own website from scratch instead. In the past, I had always been far too intimidated to start a site like this because there are so many moving parts. But it's really come together after months of tinkering.

Of course, that leads me to Eleventy, which is the static-site generator powering this blog. What I love about it is that every piece of this site is something I built. On the homepage, a postGraph shortcode renders a heatmap of every post by day—a filled square for each one—the shape of years of writing made visible at a glance. A lastModified filter reads the git history at build time to show when each page was actually last edited, not just published. EleventyFetch reaches out to the omg.lol API on every build, pulls down my latest status updates, and caches them for an hour—live data added in at compile time, no database required (never databases!). At the bottom of every post, a relatedPosts filter finds others that share tags, building a map of connection across my writing.

Next, I'm grateful for GitLab for hosting the code repository of this blog. Now, the platform does have a permissive genAI policy and there are far more ethical alternatives, such as Codeberg or Forgejo, but compared to GitHub? It is certainly the lesser of two evils, and I'm all about software harm reduction, not radical absolutism (but I support you if you are!)

Using Netlify, Eleventy, and GitLab in conjunction with one another is what allows me functionality like comments! Which I think is really cool.

I'm also deeply grateful for Mastodon. I've never used a microblogging platform before, avoiding Twitter for its entire existence (thankfully). But fedi has been such a delight, from the cat photos to the photography and art to the interesting articles I wouldn't have otherwise known about. Of course, I am using omg.lol's social.lol instance!

Mastodon and the broader fediverse are federated at the protocol level. There is no central company holding a relay that all traffic passes through. Compare this to Bluesky's AT Protocol, where a central relay operated by Bluesky PBC is required for content discovery. The infrastructure dependency remains. With ActivityPub, if Mastodon the company vanished tomorrow, every server would keep federating with every other server. The protocol is the commons. The network is the commons.

Finally, of course, I need to thank Buster Benson and Kellianne for making and maintaining 750words.com, where I wrote the first draft of this blog post and every other blog post on this site. If I didn't find this website all the way back in 2011, I absolutely would not be writing, and I would not have over a million words written. It's no exaggeration to say I owe this little journal site my entire life.

Friends

Over the past few months of my IndieWeb journey, I've encountered so many wonderful people! I want to give a few specific people a shout-out here.

To start, Coyote introduced me to the 32-bit Café forum, which is a wonderful community of creatives and webweavers. Coyote writes really interesting, smart essays on the IndieWeb along with many other topics. Please go have a read!

Melo is a young, talented sysadmin and programmer responsible for superlove, one of the only forks of AO3 in existence, along with a multitude of equally impressive projects.

Brendan is a blogger (with the best domain ever) who has encouraged me to write in French more, and vice versa! Chu ben reconnaissant d'avoir un chum blogueur français.

P.J.M. / HisVirusness is a multimedia artist who has an extremely interesting "rolling-release neuro-zine" that I love reading.

Mike is a security researcher who runs the newsletter Scrolls, which is always chock full of interesting links and people, and one of the most useful nexus points for the IndieWeb I've found so far.

Adam is an academic doing work I find really interesting and important in both religion and Indigenous law, and is also an 11ty developer. That last part is a total understatement — I am pretty sure Adam has created and maintained more 11ty websites than any other person on Earth. (38 and counting!)

Alvan is a programmer and FOSS enthusiast who, impressively, created his own blogging engine. Like me, he's trying his hand at his own radio show which you should check out!

Candy is a CompSci student and artist that draws an adorable comic about slimes, toasters, and bugs and also works on various Balatro mods and artwork. I very much enjoy the aesthetic of his site!

Vick is a tinkerer and pixel artist who has made various 88x31 badges that I adore (and some I use on my site!). They're the first person who reached out and asked if they could put me on their neighbourhood/friends page which I was really touched by.

James is someone I consider very knowledgeable on the IndieWeb — his list of website ideas being one of the first resources I stumbled upon and started implementing. He was also one of the first people who reached out to respond to my article How a Taylor Swift Lyric Gave Me an Existential Crisis, being a Swiftie himself ♡ He has an IndieWeb podcast called Wonders of Webweaving that I absolutely recommend!

I am so grateful for those who have reached out and made me feel like I'm part of a community. I am bad at being proactively social myself, and I really hope to get to know more of you better!

The Life I've Been Able to Live

I have written about the Moon and what it means that we went back to her, about twelve thousand generations of homo sapiens who did not know I was coming and made room for me anyway. I have written about Long COVID and the bureaucratic wall of disability denial, about the three times the world nearly ended and the ordinary people who chose correctly in the dark. I have written about Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 paper cranes in a hospital ward, about Bon Iver retiring as I turned thirty, about Japanese writers named Banana. About God, who I believe is infinite and makes creative mistakes and grieves them. About my Métis ancestors who carried a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns. About what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.

I have written about the prairie unrolling through a car window at ninety kilometers an hour, grain elevators like punctuation marks between nothing and nothing. I've been interviewed about chess and journal writing and strawberries. I've written about boredom as fermenting agent, about schizoid personality disorder and a rich interior life mistaken for coldness, about depression as preparation rather than delay. I have written about what men must do differently and admitted, clearly, that I have not always done it. About grief that has no clean end. About the names I write down so they don't disappear.

I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley. I shoplifted Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters. I am alive and writing today and there were years when I was not sure that would be true.

What I keep trying to say in every essay and every poem and every technical walkthrough that turns out to also be about something else—is that curiosity saved my life.

Not intelligence. Not discipline. Not talent. Curiosity. The embarrassing willingness to discover and be wrong, to fall in love with a static site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of. To stay up until three in the morning reading about copyleft licensing or Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize or the water cycle on Mars or the neuroscience of narrative. To care about things that don't care back.

The commons are real. The mycorrhizal network is real. The underground exchange of resources between organisms that have no reason to cooperate but do. The tragedy of the commons was never inevitable; Hardin was wrong, Ostrom proved it, the IndieWeb is proving it every day. The Long Web is possible. People can build things that outlast the platforms that birth them. We are doing it right now.

Gratitude is not the same as acceptance. You can be deeply, wrenchingly grateful for the life you have and still insist the world should be different and better.

Writing is medicine. Neuroscience is catching up. Poetry activates the dopaminergic reward system. Story creates brain synchrony between teller and listener. When I write to you across this distance—you who I may never meet, who found this page through a search engine or a blogroll or a Mastodon boost—something real passes between us. Something that did not exist before.

I am so grateful. I am so grateful for every stranger who read something I wrote and sent a reply into the void. For you, reading this, right now. Whoever you are. Wherever this finds you.

The world is on fire and the fediverse is full of cat photos. Somewhere a grain elevator is standing in Saskatchewan in the late-afternoon light and nobody is looking at it and it doesn't care and it's beautiful. I have been given—I don't know by what, by whom exactly—I have been given a mind to notice all this. Hands to write it down. A corner of the internet to put it in. I know how lucky that is. I hope I use it well enough to deserve it.