I am assuming that nobody was too bereft by the de-provisioning (this is a wonderful word which should soon become Orwellian) of the blog site Lobster Forest. That site was similar to this in being a free-to-use group blog based on WordPress. At Lobster Forest, there was a ridiculous focus on privacy which made open sign-ups challenging, but which also received high praise from security-minded folks early on. I’m proud of it, but it was unsustainable.
Well, for the third time in my life, I am coming OFF a wave of privacy and security effort — I’ve been on the downslope for a year or two, knuckling under to the prevailing pressure. Maybe I should have a Google account (I have none — nothing), and a LinkedIn, and Heaven forfend, a FB account. I say this with the heavy heart of a man admitting that the war is lost, and laying down his arms. But keeping the brown coat! Yes, Virginia, OpenBSD still has my heart. but Amazon and Apple have all my personal stuff, and God knows every single employer is all stuffed up with Micro-Soft.
And so the extra privacy/security at Lobster Forest is more than I am willing to support, as it was somewhat labor intensive, and subject to things sliding past me and growing stale unless pursued with diligence. Simply put, that one was expensive to run whereas this one is not, yet both were similarly inactive. The costs were split across “the small group” who put the thing together in the first place, and from time to time we would kick around ideas for what to do with the site. But nothing came of it, and we finally just pulled the plug rather than renew.
The book reviews were a plus!
Lobster Forest was named using the time-honored tradition of selecting two highly uncorrelated words, in this case, drawn from a setting (a forest) in a movie (The Lobster). I highly recommend that you see The Lobster. I should review it some time.
