I’ve been helping a friend with some admin things for their website, like creating automations to do things like post to both Discord and the fediverse when updates are made. Setting up integrations like these has become so much easier than I could have ever imagined. I started self-hosting technically back in 2000 with Geocities, but I got my first subdomain with FTP access and cPanel in 2004. If it weren’t for Softaculous, I could not have done anything with it except plain-text pages of nonsense. The one-click software installs it provided enabled me to be self-sufficient and simultaneously learn so much CSS and HTML that I still use today.

I have a lot of things hosted/installed through Yunohost now, and while it’s similar to Softaculous in that there are one-click installs, there are a lot of issues with outdated and buggy packages on there, which often results in less features and unpatched security vulnerabilities. The tool is meant to enable anybody to spin up and host multiple sites and services on one server, but it takes a lot of manual intervention and on the fly learning to keep things going. If you’d asked me 20 years ago if I ever thought I could navigate a server in the terminal app and type commands from memory, I would have said that I’d have a better chance of becoming a molecular engineer. It’s funny how things go.

I am excited to make this post because I’ve set up automated announcements to my social media account when I publish a post here. It’s all done through the API, and while I contextually know what an API is, I don’t even know what the acronym stands for. If someone like me can manage it, so many others can too! With the proper support and documentation, in the near future we may see an emergence of people taking back control over their data and privacy from the megacorps… a girl can dream, but I’ll also keep doing what I can to help others get there in the meantime.