Fly away, little bird

The last day of July happened to be the day that Domagoj Margan, a former student teaching assistant and a great friend of mine, set up his own DigitalOcean droplet running a web server and serving his professional website on his own domain domargan.net. For a few years, I was helping him by providing space on the server I owned and maintained, and I was always glad to do so. Let me explain why.

During the early years of Mozilla (video recording of my 2015 talk in Croatian, a really nice article at ExtremeTech), I would follow Planet Mozilla to be up to date with the happenings in the community. Over time I became aware of the fact that, while some people hosted their pages or blogs on free services or their company/university domains and servers, others owned their domain names and servers used for the same purpose.

At that time (and for a while after that) I wasn't aware of the value of owning a domain name, but I roughly understood the main argument for self-hosting your website, which is independence from a particular organization you might cease to be affiliated with. In addition, with social networks centralizing interactions on the web and creating walled gardens of content, having your own domain and setting up your own communication services (be it web, e-mail, or XMPP) is a good way to contribute to Internet remaining decentralized.

It still took me until late 2014 to bite the bullet and move from Department of Informatics's www.inf.uniri.hr/~vmiletic to my own domain (vedran.miletic.net at the moment) and my own hosting. At the time, I already had some experience with setting up and troubleshooting Apache. It was mostly coming from a few years of maintaining the Department's inf2 server, where MoinMoin used to be the prime tenant, but a number of PHP applications also found their home.

Despite being lazy about registering my own domain and setting up my own web server, I must mention that I did keep my page reasonably up to date, i.e. at least once a year I would make sure that all the content (courses, scientific work, interests, software, etc.) is still correct. (It's not the only instance where I work hard not to repeat the mistakes of my professors observed while being their student.)

I mentioned my decision to Domagoj, suggested to him to do the same and offered my help and support if he would decide to register his own domain and set up his own website. (I also wished my professors would have explained to me the value of the domain names and encouraged me to get one, so there is that trying to improve on what they did.) To my pleasant surprise, he was convinced by the arguments about decentralization and independence that I brought up at the time and also detailed above.

From that moment I knew that a day will come when a little bird will grow up and decide to leave the nest and create their own, i.e. Domagoj will want to set up his own hosting that he will have complete control of, and in the future use it to help others walk the same path. That's precisely how things should be, that's exactly how new Internet nodes should appear, and that's exactly how the Internet should grow towards becoming more decentralized.

Fly away, little bird, the world is awaiting you.