Dead Parrot BBS is a personal technology blog about computers, the independent web, old and alternative technology, and the ways technology shapes how we communicate, create, work, and live.
I’m Nick, an IT Business Systems Analyst, longtime Linux user, self-hoster, guitarist, history student, and someone who has been around computers long enough to remember when getting online felt more like entering a place than opening an app.
My interests tend to live at the intersection of technology, history, and independence. I write about things like self-hosting, RSS, the Fediverse, Gemini, old operating systems, forgotten protocols, retrocomputing, digital ownership, software simplicity, AI and human creativity, and the gradual shift from an open web toward a handful of large platforms.
I am especially interested in technologies that are still useful after the industry has moved on from them, and in alternatives that give individuals more control over their own data, software, and online identity.
The “BBS” in the name is mostly a nod to that older spirit of the Internet. There is no actual bulletin board system here. The name reflects the kind of online space I prefer: smaller, personal, independent, and run by people rather than platforms.
Dead Parrot BBS is self-hosted and built around ordinary web standards. The site supports RSS and federation, and the website itself is intended to remain the permanent home of everything published here.
This is not a tech news site, a product-review site, or an attempt to keep up with every new release. It is simply a place to write about technology that I find interesting, useful, strange, forgotten, or worth thinking about.