I’m bored, and decided maybe I can ramble in a way that’s an ounce more productive than just scrambling my brain, so I decided to install WordPress on a whim.

Anyways, this is a first post, so I should probably just explain who I am. I’m Ram, a queer political advocate with immense interest in technology. In recent months I’ve been really interested in the Fediverse and Federated platforms which has also fed my interest in Free (Libra) Open Source Software (FLOSS). I’m active on Lemmy as @[email protected], an instance I chose because I love the Light Novel series Ascendance of a Bookworm, Mastodon/Firefish as @[email protected], Rizon IRC as ram, Matrix as @ram:mozilla.org, and Bookwyrm as @[email protected], and BlueSky as @ramram.ink.

As is the nature of these platforms, I may leave one instance to move to another (I recently left @[email protected] even), and my identity will be extremely malleable. This is a feature of the Fediverse. Even where I have a solid identity, it’s constantly ephemeral.

I also host a bunch of FLOSS behind a Cloudflare tunnel for my own personal use, including NextCloud, FreshRSS, this WordPress blog, Rainy for hosting images, YoURLs for a URL shortener, Pihole to stop Twitter and Facebook from watching me online, Calibre to keep track of my ePubs, Jellyfin to watch stuff when I’m not home, Owncast for LiveStreaming (which I never do), and WeeChat for IRC access when I’m not at home.

Beyond FLOSS, I play video games and watch anime. Recently I’ve been playing through the Kingdom Hearts games and finished Kingdom Hearts 2. My favourite airing anime is Frieren, an anime about an elf who was in the party that saved the world, following her journeys as she comes to terms with the painfully brief lifespan of humans.

So far, my interest in tech probably would be my “defining feature”, and I’d agree, but anyone who talks to me knows I’m absurdly political. As technology and politics intertwine this becomes inevitable. To broadly cover my political stances, I’d say that I’m anti-capitalist, pro-community, I think social media has been a scourge upon our society, smartphones are insanely unhealthy in how dependent we (and I) are on them, and that we need to find a way to reintegrate into community; if not my generation, the younger generation must. Of course climate change, the myriad human rights abuses against our (Canada’s) indigenous populations, the constant and obvious abuse of the legal system against the marginalized, are no less pressing matters to me.

I don’t know what this blog will be about, if anything, or if I’ll even post again/when, but I think it’ll be nice to have a place where I can ramble once in a blue moon. Maybe I’ll post today even, since this is just a basic introduction to “Who Is Ram?”