A Year Since the Big Switch - Part V - In Summary
"The truth always finds its way out, even years and years and years later. The truth always prevails." -Tyler Hamilton
THREE years after a campaign of SLAPP (much of it because Daniel Pocock had struck a nerve, particularly inside Debian if not Canonical too) we're more robust to censorship than ever before. Nothing is perfect or 'bullet-proof', but most things are relative.
Now that the new site (with new SSG; we dumped WordPress after nearly 17 years!) is one year old we took time to explain the move. Part I spoke about the technical aspects, Part II explained the growing problem associated with bullies (coping with wannabe censors and delusional 'Internet cops'), Part III dealt with overambitious 'bullshit artists' (social engineering basically), and Part IV ("Intimidation Against Host/ISP, Which Offered Help Relocating to Safer Haven") explained how the migration happened last September.
Writing online is easy - even straightforward - if you focus on relatively benign stuff like computing, games (sans "gamergate") or uncontroversial cuisine... and your hosting is done by thick-skinned staff, not companies that operate at a loss ('free' hosting as bait) or volunteers who can run out of money and close down operations. In 2018 we had to change hosting because the host was shutting down everything; his business had failed and after nearly a decade we needed to find a new home. It's a bit like "clown computing", but no home has its own ISP and datacentre-grade Internet connection, so self-hosting (as opposed to outsourcing) every single thing is not that simple in practice.
Social control media is a good example of things that are temporary, transient, volatile, and highly unpredictable (Google+ anyone?). There are barely any exceptions to this and it looks like Mastodon will end up like Diaspora did.
In hindsight, using static site generators (with static pages) tends to leave sites better off if one assumes a sort of "format-shifting" or migrations will become inevitable. Not many hosting businesses or sites last several decades (I'm fortunate that my personal site has been with the same host for over 20 years already).
For a site to have the same host for over a decade is quite rare; many have outsourced to Fastly or ClownFlare. In many cases the back ends also changed in order to reduce costs, taking health issues and financial issues into account as well.