why I built this

I got tired of renting my identity.

For years my writing, my photos, my conversations all lived inside other people’s databases. They were the landlords; I was a tenant who paid in attention and data. When a platform changed its rules, or its algorithm, or simply decided to die, I lost the thing I’d built on it. That’s not ownership. That’s a long-term lease with no renewal clause.

So this site follows a few old rules from the IndieWeb:

1. Own your domain. mtrav.online is my identity, not @me on someone’s silo. The domain is the one piece that’s truly mine; everything underneath it is replaceable.
2. Own your content. Every post is a Markdown file in a git repo I control. I can read it in a text editor in fifty years. No export button required, because there’s nothing to escape from.
3. Publish here first. The canonical copy lives here. If I syndicate a post to a silo, it links back to this URL. (That’s POSSE — Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.)
4. Own your URLs. Permalinks are permanent and human-readable. I’m not going to break them later. The address bar is part of the writing.

The aesthetic is deliberate too. Everyone’s site looks like everyone else’s now — the same rounded cards, the same sans-serif, the same three shades of gray. This one looks like a CRT someone left on in a server room. Build for yourself first. Weird is good.

It’s not finished. It won’t ever really be finished, and that’s the point — it’s a place to keep working, not a product to ship and abandon. Pull up a chair. The cursor’s blinking.