Dead Parrot BBS is not actually a BBS.
The name is a nod to an older Internet, when online spaces were smaller, stranger, more independent, and usually run by people rather than platforms. I miss some of that spirit.
This site exists because I still find computers and the Internet interesting, but I am less interested in the usual version of “tech” than I used to be. I do not care much about product launches, corporate ecosystems, or whatever device is supposed to change everything this year.
I am more interested in the parts of technology that feel personal.
Old operating systems. Forgotten protocols. Self-hosting. RSS. Gemini. The Fediverse. BBS culture. Software that does one thing well. Computers that remain useful long after the industry has declared them obsolete. The growing difficulty of owning anything digital. The tension between convenience and independence.
I am also interested in how we got here.
The Internet was not always dominated by a handful of giant platforms. Software was not always expected to become a subscription. A website did not always need analytics, advertising networks, JavaScript frameworks, tracking scripts, CDNs, and half a dozen outside services just to display some text and images.
Some of those changes were improvements. Some probably were not.
Dead Parrot BBS is where I intend to think through those questions.
There will be practical experiments here, too. I may try to make an old operating system useful again, set up some obscure network service, replace a cloud product with something I control, or spend far too much time investigating a technology most people stopped thinking about twenty years ago.
Not every experiment will make sense.
That is part of the point.
This site is also an experiment in how I want to use the Internet.
It is independently hosted. It has RSS. It participates in the Fediverse. It is being built around ordinary web standards rather than around a social platform. I want the website itself to be the permanent home of what I write, with other services acting as ways to discover or follow it rather than places that own it.
That approach requires a little more work.
I think that is a reasonable price to pay.
Dead Parrot BBS will mostly be about technology, but not technology as an industry. It will be about computers, networks, software, history, autonomy, and the sometimes strange relationship people have developed with the machines and systems surrounding them.
In other words, the sort of things I keep finding interesting enough to think about.
That seems like a good enough reason for a blog to exist.