I write sporadically about a few different things. Each of these fills a different purpose in my life, and I want to share them differently

Category Examples Medium Reason
Personal reflections Personal issues
People problems
 Paper journal
Face-to-face conversation		 If it is online, it will never remain private
Family activities Snaps of the grandchildren
Everyday activities		 Private WhatsApp group Common denominator among the group
My interests Hobbies
Photographs		 Blog Happy to share them widely
Professional matters Software and system problems
and their solutions		 Blog Want to share them widely

Personal reflections are written in a paper journal; if they are shared at all, it is by face-to-face communication. My feeling is that if it is online anywhere, it will not stay private.

Everyday activities are shared on a private WhatsApp group consisting of parents, children, siblings, etc.

  • It is hard to know who to include and who to exclude.
  • Sometimes, there is something that might be of interest to a few more remote relatives or friends, but I don’t want to add them to the group. I have so solution for this. Perhaps an unlisted public group of some sort. This makes it relatively private and secure, provided that it does not matter if anything posted here becomes really public.
  • I am not a big fan of WhatsApp, but it is the common denominator for this group of people, and I don’t have the time or motivation to get everyone to use something better. This WhatsApp group is linked to a self-hosted messaging server so that I am confident that I have a record of everything if WhatsApp turns ugly.

Personal interests and professional matters that I feel can be made public, I write about on a blog linked to my own domain; the service is provided by a 3rd-party blog system.

  • I have configured the blog system to republish to various social networks.
  • I should also hook it up to my self-hosted messaging server so that I have control over the data.
  • At the moment, I use the blog provider’s web app to compose articles. This means that I need to be online; I have not found a suitable client application.

I self-host a Matrix server. Initially, this was an experiment to see if it is something that grandma could use rather than WhatsApp 1. I subsequently set up gateways to various other messaging services (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Groups, SMS)

  • to give me ownership of a copy my data
  • to give me a single application for all of my chats

This is working pretty well, though I am not happy with my data backup solution.

  1. No. The server is reliable and stable. However, the client applications are confusing for non-geeks. ↩︎