@trebach @ParadeGrotesque @libredove The actual reason I run it--whoever the "they" represents--the same as the reason I, like @ParadeGrotesque apparently, run Slackware in a lot of places: it's a matter of good taste. (Before the smoke escaped the machine, FSE ran Slackware. It's on CRUX now. :crux:) Having done a lot of Rails at work, and having had considerable difficulty escaping Rails (though I have been a fan of Ruby for a long time and Rails allowed me to write Ruby at work, Rails itself has always been a mess of PHP nonsense combined with Very Enterprise Java bullshit). I am not going to run Rails in my spare time, and I don't want to deploy anything that I actually dislike hacking on. Pleroma's much nicer and much less branding-infested than Mastodon in general, but "It's not Rails" was a pretty big selling point for me.

At any rate, FSE hasn't lived on a VPS for years. It's a physical computer. Before, it was a Dell R820, Postgres and Venti on the host (CRUX) and I had libvirt running the Slackware VM that FSE was on. That box breathed its last in February and has very recently been replaced with an ARM cluster (all of which are running CRUX).

I should say that, had @ParadeGrotesque not either intentionally misled you or perhaps merely spoke with complete disregard for the facts, the reason for the extra domain would be obvious, because it's linked all over: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/update-and-roadmap.html . Note the conspicuous absence of support for fascism: this is no accident, I do not like fascism. (Go ask a fascist what he thinks of my politics.)