Domains, Identity, and Inertia

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place.

Mastodon is cool, but “belonging” to an instance can carry more meaning than I care for. I’m not interested in self-hosting Mastodon or GoToSocial or anything like that, so having it come along for “free” with Ghost makes it a tempting option.

Except I don’t love the new domain name. It’s fine, I guess, but I’ve got so many years wrapped up as baty.net that it seems a shame to move away from it. Wouldn’t it be cool if my “Fediverse” identity could be @jack@baty.net? Remove one character and it’s my email address. Remove five more characters and it’s my website. I like this idea.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t move baty.net again. If I want to play with a new blog, I’m supposed to create a new one, somewhere else. We all know what happens when I try moving a blog to a new platform…I move it back in a month.

This time, though, if I want the benefits of blogging, posting to social media, and reading the feed all in one place, that place needs to be baty.net. At least if I want @jack@baty.net, it does.

Importing years of Hugo posts to Ghost isn’t fun. I’ve done it before, and it was a pain. Inevitably, some images or links end up breaking. I hate that.

If I move my identity and blog management to Ghost, it means I’m all in. There’s no going back. Not without breaking even more than the usual stuff.

Still noodling on this. I’m impulsive when it comes to new stuff. I should spend time thinking this through. Or at least I should wait until everything actually works. Hanging my hat on a beta release is stupid. And yet, I’m this close.

Maybe I could get used to being @jack@copingmechanism.com instead.