Why I wrote the fx web server

I used to always run my blog via a static site generator. For people unfamiliar with this, it essentially means that you modify files locally and then send these files to a static site hoster like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare. This worked fine but it wasn't very fast. Uploading a blogpost would take me a few minutes. I would need to modify the files locally, verify that it looked good, and then send them to the server.

The alternative was to setup a Wordpress server, but somehow that didn't feel good to me. Wordpress servers always felt too bloated. I just wanted exactly the things I needed and nothing more. No plugins. No styling options. No intricate menu's. Social media doesn't have those things either. On social media sites like X/Twitter, you can only made a profile banner and add posts. And it works. Isn't this what writing is about anyway? You write articles/blogs/letters/memos, or whatever you want to call it and publish it. Social media is widely used so it must work.

That's why I made fx. A web service that is like X but open source. You can run it on a tiny server with only a few dozen MBs of memory. It supports Markdown, syntax highlighting, math, can be used on mobile devices, can handle file uploads, and most importantly: you can backup the server to Git! So no need to worry about losing changes when you publish your text. It's all safely stored in Git.

I've setup the software as open source from the start, with the permissive MIT license. Instructions for self-hosting it are in the README.

So far writing posts is much more fun now. I am not afraid of comments since there are no comments. People who want to send a comment can do that via other channels like email. I'm not afraid of being banned or shadowbanned. It all feels very free. I just write what I want to write. Like X or other social media platforms, whenever I have a thought that I think is good, I can just post it in seconds from my computer or mobile phone. I'm also not anxious for whether I get likes because there are no likes.

That's what writing should be about. Howard Marks said that he wrote his memos not for other people but for himself. It took years before his memo's became widely read. Same with E.W. Dijkstra's manuscripts. Most of his early manuscripts were only sent to a few readers. But E.W. Dijkstra kept writing and learning, and now the manuscripts have their own archive page at the University of Texas at Austin.

He just kept writing because the writing was not about being read. The writing was meant to practice, to teach, and to learn. That's what this software is for.