last Updated at 10:40am et on 10/17/25 1
I’ve owned this domain for almost 10 years now.
“Weird Al” Yankovic has an off-hand lyric about making a MySpace page for his dog. before Jonathan Coulton was commissioned by valve for custom songs to feature in both left 4 dead 2 and portal, he became known by posting an original song every week for an entire year. I’ve long understood the connection between owning your own means of distribution 2 and independent success, so when I started my first serious attempt at establishing a permanent presence in the fighting game community: I knew I needed a website. that’s when i purchased this domain from [redacted registrar name here] 3 and began making my own hub.
so now, here i am: posting on my website in the year 2025. this site is really one of the only internet bastions i can trust anymore. twitter was taken over by the richest man alive a few years ago, bluesky’s ceo has gleefully been cheering as people leave her platform (but not her protocol), and tiktok was recently sold to oracle 4 . even now, the owners of wordpress.com are in a lawsuit with a plugin developer 5 in a battle that threatens the very freedom of the entire open-source ecosystem. i owe a personal apology to everyone who warned me of this eventuality in the many irc channels i ventured into during the mid to late 2000’s .
i really think each of these migrations shows how little bluesky pbllc cares about the average user and its just such a shame that they don't value creators like me enough to show an iota of respect
— dapurplesharpie (@sharpiepls.com) October 3, 2025 at 4:10 PM
i want to work on showing others all of the cool free and open-source solutions that exist because the marketing around these closed-source, saas options absolutely terrify me as the status quo. i’ve spent countless hours helping online friends and close family move from square-space or linktree to wordpress or a self-hosted site through git.hub and i personally helped around 80 people migrate from bluesky to another self-hosted pds option these last two months, but i still feel like i’m not doing enough.
the best answer i’ve found thus far has been to detach from distraction and focus on solutions. at this point, that means posting less on microblogging sites like bluesky and moving into long-form again. before i can figure out the best way to educate people, i need to rewire my brain and regardless of how i look at it: sites like bluesky are horrible for my mental. people like me who hyper-fixate have been known to spiral on sites on bluesky and i’m ready to break the cycle. that’s not to say i won’t occasionally post on that site when i have something new to announce, but i’ve uninstalled the official application from my phone and no longer get notifications for that site. take that information and do what you will.
autoblue has actually been really helpful in this regard. its a free wordpress plugin that automatically integrates with your atprotocol account and cross-posts to bluesky from wordpress. the thing that really separates it from any other plugin, free or paid, on the market is that it also displays any bluesky comments underneath the wordpress post as integrated comments on your site too!
don’t believe me? head over to bluesky and leave a comment under this post, then come back over here real quick.
i also want to personally thank the developer for updating his app with new integration features allowing atprotocol accounts hosted on non-bluesky servers to use his app.
Autoblue 1.0 is out, officially out of beta and now with support for self-hosted PDS instances! 🎊 Next up: improving the comments block
— Daniel Post (@danielpost.com) October 8, 2025 at 10:59 AM
he was so kind in doing so and all he asked in return was a kind review on the wordpress site (which of course, i provided), but i’m going to link his personal bluesky account on here too so you can follow and support him if you’re on that site. he’s a good guy.
all of this to say, i don’t necessarily want to jump all in on atprotocol, so i’m diversifying my decentralized portfolio. i was ready to go all-in on atprotocol last month, until the ceo of bluesky pulled a 180° and made me second-guess using anything on that protocol. rudy fraser over at blacksky has been acting like the tech leader we all thought jay was, so that (and stream.place) are really the only two applications that i’m watching to determine the long-term uses of the protocol. leaflet is still in very early phase and doesn’t quite cater to the multimedia posting requirements i need yet, but i’ll keep watching for updates because i know they’re coming.
as the creators of atproto, they have a responsibility to educate users on how it works but they've done an especially poor job on doing so if atproto is no longer their focus, they should publicly state that & start focusing on whatever their goal is instead of fence-sitting whenever it suits them
— dapurplesharpie (@sharpiepls.com) September 13, 2025 at 9:06 AM
i can’t trust bluesky pbllc to be good stewards of the protocol while these applications develop ( even with their pledge ), so i’m stuck exactly where i was post-twitter migration: following a few fragmented developers in different ecosystems.
- Yes, that is a Marx reference. If a PBS pundit like David Brooks can reference it and not be considered a terrorist, I should be able to as well. ↩︎
- I pay a lot of money to keep this information between me and ICANN. You can also WHOIS me and trace those routes to find my registrar, but the people who are reading this definitely won’t do that and the people who will already have. ↩︎
- “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” – The CEO of Oracle, 2024 ↩︎
- Automattic demanded web host pay $32M annually for using WordPress trademark ↩︎
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Leaving a post now, so we can look back at the very first blog post that kicked everything off. Happy XX anniversary or XXXXXX milestone. You’re one of the coolest and smartest ladies I’ve ever had the honor of calling my bestie. Love you!~ 💕
🥹 STOP IT, IM GONNA CRY IRL
I was just talking about this over dinner last night, enjoyed every bit of this and hearing your voice of course
i’m dedicated to making sure any of my projects have a certain level of accessibility because tbh : EYE also hate reading 🤭
<3 and you know I love a voice note or audio option lol this is why we are ONE
I needed this article more than I thought I would tbh
Oh wow this is sick. Awesome job
picture taken by the very talented @winstonzhou.com as part of my 2025 birthday shoot
any comments under this post will show up on my website 😉
Subscribe to sharpie 360 days a year for year round anti-grappler coverage. The other 5 are for when she plays grapplers.
Cool. You’re dope as hell Sharpie!!!
i have @danielpost.com to thank for this tool !!
Comment section, you shall address her as her majesty, Queen Sharpie of the FGC, patron saint and primary benefactor of the Skull Girls (rambles on with a dozen more titles).
Welp, guess I have something to try and sort out once I stop being both busy and broke. Good stuff, Sharpie.
it always starts with us; praxis-driven posting!
when is your next article for your newsletter ?? 👀
it’s being drafted!
oh man this code section looks like EXACTLY the kind of format i’ve been looking for for posting/blogging any chance you could take the time to speedrun me through your pipeline? ^_^;
Totally agree. Great post, Sharpie!
Hey Sharpie! Just a friendly heads up, your site is a little hard to read on mobile. I’ve attached a screenshot of what it looks like on my device for reference.
thanks so much for letting me know !! i just updated the margins on the post page to hopefully be more legible ; can you clear your local browser cache on your phone and refresh the page to let me know if its easier to read ?
Much better! Thanks so much!
whoa mama, is this actually true? like… what if i deleted this account? also, this is really amazing, thanks for this. 😍
I appreciate you being a part of this community and being a voice of accountability. Nobody should bet everything on one protocol. Governance is hard and nobody will get it right. More options more interop is more better. #PeopleNotPlatforms
This is so cool! This might actually get me to start coding again.
Yeah.. that’s smart. Let us return to the era of the Web Ring and everyone just having their own damn website.