Hello, bello. I am excited to be writing this blog post to announce my latest venture and project created by the 🍓 Berry House agency: 🔆 brennan.day. I chose this domain because I aim to write daily, and it just seems so happy and uplifting! (I did also grab brennan.page just in case Brennan Day wants to buy it from me.)

Introducing brennan.day

While I have been an advocate for the indieweb for many years, I haven't ever committed to my own. I've had many failed attempts and false starts (for example, plainjournal and brennanbrown.netlify.app were earlier personal site iterations). But this one is finally exactly where I want it to be, and I'll tell you why.

Around a week ago, I found a wonderful IndieWeb project called omg.lol and instantly fell in love. For those unfamiliar, omg.lol is a delightfully human web service created by Adam Newbold that provides a profile page, blog (weblog.lol), status updates (status.lol), a Mastodon instance (social.lol), and more — all for $20/year, with no surveillance capitalism or dark patterns. As they beautifully put it: "There's no AI in omg.lol, and there never will be. It's just real humans with real hearts here."

This blog started as an omg.lol weblog, but I quickly realized I needed the robustness that a blog-from-scratch would offer me, you know? Full control over the markup, the ability to implement advanced IndieWeb features, and the flexibility to grow the site exactly how I envision it. But starting with the limitations of omg.lol provided me an excellent foundation which I lacked in previous attempts. Sometimes constraints breed creativity, and omg.lol taught me to focus on what truly matters: authentic human connection through writing.

There are several aspects of this site that make me really excited (and probably don't matter at all to anybody else, but I'm going to tell you anyway).

For too long, I have been complacent with my uncritical usage of various social media platforms despite my vocal public complaints of them. Not just social media, but my tech usage and consumption in general. This ends now.

brennan.day is hosted on GitLab rather than GitHub, and I am using Porkbun instead of Namecheap for domain management. These might seem like small choices, but they matter. GitLab is open-source and allows self-hosting. Porkbun is an independent company not owned by venture capital.

Likewise, I am now active on Mastodon (specifically on the omg.lol instance at social.lol) and plan to sunset my accounts on various platforms such as Google and Meta. I believe it is completely possible to exist as an Internet user without partaking in surveillance capitalism or bending the knee to harmful companies. This is practice rather than ideology.

I want this site to be the original source of truth for me. POSSE is an IndieWeb principle that means "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere." Instead of posting directly to social media where you don't own your content, you publish on your own site first, then syndicate copies to other platforms.

To start, I'm using various services to sync my work here with other platforms. Bridgy is an open-source project that implements backfeed and POSSE as a service, sending webmentions for comments, likes, and interactions from platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Reddit back to my site. Echofeed reads my RSS feed and cross-posts to Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog, and more.

Ideally, in the future, I'll have a specific custom collection of microblogging (or Tweets, if you'd prefer) that will get broadcast to my various platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. The key is that everything originates here, on my own domain, under my control.

Similarly, in the future, I will be using Buttondown to send newsletters that consist of my blog posts via RSS. Buttondown is a small, independent newsletter platform that prioritizes creators — they don't take a cut of paid subscriptions, offer one-click migration, and focus on simplicity over feature bloat.

While I have a Substack, and I think the platform has a lot of positives, it also has a track record of not dealing with hate speech to a degree I feel comfortable with. For now, I will be primarily still using Medium to write my blog posts, as I earn an income that way. But brennan.day represents my home on the web, free from platform dependencies.

Another fun aspect of this site is the slash pages, which include a rather large number of different pages that my site has that contain a detailed and thorough look at me and various aspects of anything related to me, if you so choose to stalk me. Slash pages are a growing IndieWeb convention for standard pages about yourself — /now for what you're currently up to, /uses for your tools and setup, /about for your story, and more.

Taking stock of myself and inventory of my life like this has been grounding and humbling. There's something clarifying about documenting who you are and what you care about in a format that's meant to be useful rather than performative. These aren't social media profiles optimized for engagement metrics — they're genuine reference material for anyone who wants to actually know me.

Also, of course, the design of the site itself aims to be fun! I hope you enjoy it and find the various easter eggs buried throughout. The site is built with accessibility in mind from the ground up, semantic HTML, proper ARIA labels, and a design that works whether you're on a desktop screen or using a screen reader.

An Invitation

I believe everybody should have their own website. Platforms like NeoCities and omg.lol do an excellent job of providing gateways for this. Own your own domain, own your own digital space.

We cannot afford to wait for mainstream options to become palatable. As I've written about extensively in my article "The Piss Average Problem," the current state of the internet is one where bot traffic has exceeded human traffic, where AI-generated content floods every platform, where authenticity becomes practically unverifiable. The antidote to this isn't to disengage — it's to reclaim our space on the web.

If you're looking for a new year's resolution (for whatever reason), I think this an excellent one. Build something that's yours. Write something that's real. Connect in ways that platforms can't commodify.

Let's Connect

If you have any questions or concerns regarding accessibility, or you find a bug, etc. please create an issue, email me, or write a note in my guestbook!

You can also find me on Mastodon, follow my work on GitLab, check out my Tumblr poetry blog, or read my longer essays on Medium.

Thank you so much for reading, and have an excellent day 😃