< the skull

THE LAST STEPS
==============
2026-06-18

I can’t deny that over the last few months I’ve created a handful of websites,
many of which don’t even exist anymore, mostly as a form of experimentation.
Pablo’s Space [1], for example, has been my target more than once. It went from
something consolidated and old, running on WordPress, to my weird little
experiments in the IndieWeb. It became a good blog, but I’m restless, so
naturally I blew it up.

The other sites in the same vein followed the same path: they were destroyed and
rebuilt, tested, adjusted, and remade. Nothing stayed. Everything was temporary.

And I have to confess, this has been very interesting. I’ll probably keep
testing things for a while longer until I find myself in this whole “indie”
world. The truth is, I don’t want to talk about myself. I want to create, and to
create, maybe I need to understand first.

Personal websites follow a different logic than systems. I don’t keep changing
systems, and my systems stay intact. They are things I consider good enough, and
I’m not arrogant enough to touch them unless it’s to fix small bugs.

Anyway, the truth is that I don’t think I want to talk about myself. Don’t trust
the creature, trust the creator. If you’re reading this post on this blog right
now, maybe in a week it won’t even exist anymore.

To talk about the next steps, I first need to talk about what I’ve been up to.

I rented another VPS from Contabo — I really like them, first-class service in
my opinion, and the best part is that it’s raw: do it yourself — and turned this
small, simple VPS into a Pangolin server, to escape Cloudflare’s claws. But I
ran into some problems, as I wrote about in Exposing self-hosted streaming
behind CGNAT [2].

I also took the opportunity to bring my blog, the one you’re reading right now,
closer to the IndieWeb without changing its core, only its theme, as I explained
in Teaching Ghost to speak IndieWeb [3].

On that VPS running Pangolin, I placed a few services that are hosted behind
CGNAT so they could be exposed to the internet, such as Noctem Café [4], which
is an absolutely experimental pubnix running on OpenBSD — my first time messing
with this OS.

I also managed to turn a port-scanning tool, `ncat`, into a posting tool using
the SOLED/2 protocol. You can check out the small and pleasant result at
Soledade City [5].

I could list all the services I’m exposing and hosting, but I don’t know, it
doesn’t make much sense right now, and there’s quite a lot of stuff — I’m
feeling lazy. Maybe I’ll write a post in the future exclusively about
self-hosting and how I manage it all.

I also finally found the courage to stop the specific attacks I was receiving on
my servers by moving a good part of my infrastructure into the Tailnet, as I
wrote in The night we put Forgejo behind the Tailnet [6].

Even though the article talks about Forgejo, it was just the first service I
pulled away from the surface. After that, I took a whole bunch with it. 😊

Anyway, everything was created, destroyed, and rebuilt several times, in several
different ways, so I could learn. And that’s fine. I’ve learned a lot, and the
more I know, the more I want to know.

All I know is that it’s hard to reconcile my work time with my experiments. At
least sleeping very little is already something I do, hehe, and in the dead of
night, the lab comes alive.

Covered and censored view of servers I administer or help administer

When I say the administration is rough, above are some servers I manage and
others I help manage, covered up and censored.

That’s it. Let’s go, because there’s more coming.

Links:
  [1] https://pablo.space
  [2] https://pablomurad.com/exposing-self-hosted-streaming-behind-cgnat/
  [3] https://pablomurad.com/teaching-ghost-to-speak-indieweb/
  [4] https://noctem.cafe
  [5] https://soledade.city
  [6] https://pablomurad.com/the-night-we-put-forgejo-behind-the-tailnet/


< the skull