A ghost in the shell

It almost seems as if it’s tradition to keep changing my blogging setup every couple of years. When I migrated my namesake website from GitHub Pages and Jekyll to Tumblr, I did so intending to spend less time on the web development aspects and more time on writing content for the blog itself. During its run, I did mostly that, occasionally dipping into the CSS and JavaScript to edit some parts of the website’s theme. When this year started, I didn’t anticipate a migration to a different platform, let alone running my own self-hosted instance. Unfortunately, the parent company that owns Tumblr and WordPress.com have made this decision for me.

For those that may be unaware, Automattic is planning to partner with OpenAI and other AI companies by offering them user-hosted blogs and content as training data for these large language models (LLMs), provided that they respect and honor requests from users to not include their data in that dataset. While I, personally, do not condone the usage of my written content to be included in training datasets non-consensually, I appreciate that Automattic is trying to keep it under users’ control by providing an option to opt-out. Whether it should be an opt-in basis or if they shouldn’t partner with these companies at all is another topic, but this particular decision in and of itself doesn’t bother me.

What does bother me, however, is that this decision is paired with some recent events on Tumblr regarding transphobic actions and a lack of proper moderation. Transphobia is something I will never tolerate, and I don’t want my content being hosted on a platform where such actions are condoned. Combined with the recent AI decisions, Automattic has eroded my trust in them as my platform provider for my content. As such, I have been given no other choice than to migrate elsewhere.

While the idea of static site generation is appealing for various reasons, I’d still prefer not to handle any additional web development, and I’d very much prefer to just write content. After some research, I’ve decided to host my own Ghost website through DigitalOcean, which is where you’re likely seeing this post. Incidentally, this gives me the advantage of using my preferred Markdown editor of choice, iA Writer, and publishing content through it.

In short, I am extremely disappointed in Automattic’s recent behavior and have moved my content to a self-hosted solution. I have yet to figure out what the best approach will be for Indexing Your Heart’s website, since it is the only other major site being hosted on Tumblr.

Do better, Automattic.