The newsletter at federatedmind.com makes the case. This blog shows the work.
Federated Mind is a publication about AI tools, open protocols, and creator-owned publishing. The argument is editorial — it lives at federatedmind.com, which is built for long-form essays, not setup notes.
This is the technical companion. It exists because some claims only land if you can see the config file.
What lives here
Specific, hands-on writing about the open-web stack: setup walkthroughs, tool reviews from a practitioner’s seat, workflow notes on AI-assisted operations, and the kind of long-form how-to that doesn’t fit in a newsletter. Less “the case for self-hosting Ghost,” more “here’s the actual Caddyfile I’m running, and here’s why.”
The first few posts will cover:
- Standing up WordPress on a $6 DigitalOcean droplet — Caddy, PHP-FPM, MySQL, the whole stack
- A local staging environment in Docker that mirrors the droplet, so you can break things without breaking production
- A push-to-production workflow with rsync over SSH — what ships, what stays local, and the safety nets that keep deploys reversible
- Eventually, a Pixelfed setup so the same images can mirror to the fediverse
If you’ve ever read a thesis piece about “owned media” and wanted to see what owning it actually looks like at the file level, that’s this blog.
What lives over there
The thesis pieces. The “why this matters” essays. The cultural arguments about platform extraction, audience portability, and what AI changes about the math of self-hosting. Those need pacing and breathing room — the newsletter is the right surface for them.
When a topic appears on both sites, the split stays consistent: federatedmind.com makes the argument, blog.federatedmind.com walks you through the implementation.
How to read this
Posts here will be long. Setup posts are long because setup is long. Expect 1,500–2,500 words with terminal output, code blocks, and the kind of detail that lets you actually run the thing yourself.
Occasionally I will also host walkthrough videos on Youtube/Peertube and link them here.
If you came here from the newsletter and you’re already convinced about the open web, this is the part where you build it.
Subscribe over there
The email list lives at federatedmind.com. If you want both sides of the argument-and-implementation pair, that’s the front door.
The newsletter is where you come to be convinced. This is where you come to build.