Digital Emigration

Building this blog without a platform

Published:

This blog is about digital emigration.

Digital emigration, as used here, means deciding to leave a digital territory because its legal, political, or economic conditions no longer allow you to operate on morally acceptable terms.

That discussion often starts with tools, vendors, or jurisdictions. In practice, the first concrete step came earlier.

Before writing a single post, I had to decide how this blog itself would exist.

The first act of digital emigration

The first act was not switching email providers or closing accounts. It was choosing to publish without relying on a platform at all.

I could have moved to a European publishing platform. That would have reduced exposure to US jurisdiction, and in many contexts that is a reasonable step. It would still, however, mean accepting platform control and a constrained exit.

The core issue here is not geography. It is exit.

This framing follows directly from the broader premise of this site, outlined in Why this blog exists: reducing dependency means making leaving cheap.

Why infrastructure matters

Publishing platforms present themselves as neutral containers. In reality, they encode assumptions about ownership, discovery, monetisation, and permanence.

Those assumptions rarely matter at the start. They surface when priorities change: rules shift, terms are revised, accounts are suspended, or external pressure is applied.

If the argument of this site is that technology choices are never purely technical, then publishing it on infrastructure that contradicts that claim would undermine the argument from the outset.

Digital emigration is therefore not mainly about what you use, but about how easily you can stop using it.

Constraints before products

I started with a small set of non-negotiables:

This ruled out most mainstream options immediately.

What remained was not a product comparison but an architectural question: what properties must publishing have if stopping, moving, or rebuilding later must remain trivial?

That same constraint-driven approach appears throughout the site, most explicitly in the dependency map.

Choosing boring technology

The resulting choices were deliberately unexciting:

There is no database, no runtime logic, and no platform-specific features. Just files turned into web pages.

“Boring” is a feature. Boring technology changes slowly, fails predictably, and is easy to replace.

Writing locally, publishing deliberately

This setup changes how writing works.

I write locally, offline if I want. I preview everything on my own machine. Nothing is published until I explicitly decide it is.

Authoring and publishing are separate again. That separation used to be normal on the web.

Hosting as a replaceable layer

Publishing consists of uploading files.

The host does not know what a post is, does not run builds, and does not own metadata. It serves bytes.

If the hosting provider disappears or changes terms, the files move elsewhere. Exit is a logistics task, not a migration project.

Why owning the domain matters

The durable anchor of this blog is not the host but the domain.

The domain points somewhere today and can point somewhere else tomorrow. That single DNS record is the only coupling point between the blog and its infrastructure.

Ownership here means control over indirection, not control over a platform.

Measuring without surveillance

Even a simple blog raises the question of analytics.

Most analytics tools assume tracking first and insight second. That model does not fit the rest of the choices made here.

This site uses a minimal, privacy-respecting page counter: no cookies, no identifiers, no consent banners.

I get a rough sense of readership. Readers do not become data exhaust.

Trade-offs

This setup provides portability, predictability, longevity, and the ability to leave without asking permission.

It does not provide built-in discovery, growth mechanics, engagement metrics, or a dopamine loop. That is intentional.

The same trade-off appears repeatedly in this project: optimising for independence over reach.

Closing

This setup does not make this blog better. It makes it harder to take away.

That used to be a normal property of the web. It is becoming a deliberate choice again.

Technical notes

These choices are not unique. They are one concrete way of making exit cheap and control explicit.

This article sits within the broader premise of the site: documenting an attempt to build a more resilient and sovereign digital life as geopolitical assumptions and the international order erode.