On Dead Links and Digital Sovereignty

With quite some breaks (caused by certain Social Media platforms that popped up at some point) I’ve been (micro)blogging since the early 2000s. These days the Small Web movement and blogging feel like little acts of rebellion. It’s not just technical mannerism, there’s a political aspect to it.

Let’s celebrate every independent blog, every personal site, every tiny corner of the small web. Even your mundane posts about garden updates or coding tutorials are acts of resistance. They’re proof that the web doesn’t have to be an engagement-optimized AI slop wasteland serving an oligarch disinformation agenda.

Adding to that, publishing via static site generation plays a crucial role in the longevity of the web. Thinking in years, even decades, complex live tech stacks become hard to maintain, while static HTML files from pre-Y2K still render perfectly.

My first blog-like page started with hand crafted HTML, then from 2004 onwards it ran as a blog/wiki-hybrid via PhpWiki until I made the switch to SSG via ElderJS in 2022 and then Astro last year. It mostly serves my own nostalgia, but perhaps there are some thoughts in there that might interest others. I’m slowly making my way through the old posts and their graveyard of dead links, bringing them back online: https://metaportaldermedienpolemik.net

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