It’s Your Girl’s Birthday Month!

I’m going to be officially the same age as my mother when she had me!

I don’t hate doing this, but I don’t like it either. But I have to make this month about me 😤

I guess this has a lot to do with being a middle child. God dammit, mum. You could’ve cancelled me. But nah, girlie thought having another daughter (and the subsequent privileged sons!) would make her husband competent all of a sudden. I wish someone had told her…

So anyways, with June being here, it means we’ve been in free fall toward the middle of the year without our consent. And that is not okay! What’s going on, you guys 😿 Why is time going so fast? Someone should hit the brakes like yesterday!

Just a quick recap of my achievements so far, aside from staying alive.

1. I learned what a federated server is, and learned to federate my website.
2. I made several major technical decisions, one of them being completely discarding a somewhat official plugin that enables my federated website to be accessed and read through a remote Mastodon app, and opted to use my “handmade” plugins instead. Very self-governance of me. Much self-sovereign.
3. Another technical decision, and quite a financial one: I purchased the mutualaidspace.org and mutualaid.space domains. I also have a written vision of what I want for the future of this project. And yes, of course, a federated social media platform is on the table.
4. I set up my own cloud storage, completely free of charge. Just crying a little because it’s child’s play, basically. Nextcloud makes me feel smart, tbh. But the most important thing is, I have my own cloud storage, and nobody can humble me ever!
5. I restarted the weekly mutual aid checkpoint but this time it is more intentional. Because I really want people to move! To take action! I will be more sickening on the timeline. RIP to people who follow me on the Fediverse without checking.
6. The mutual aid checkpoint is a distinct project entirely, with the main objective being amplification. The checkpoint is every Friday, and then the following Wednesday, I publish an article and newsletter featuring the first 10 requests that week, plus the Palestinian Campaign Spotlight. The goal is to ensure the requests stay longer in people’s feeds and reach a wider audience, not only through SEO in the conventional genocidergoogle sense, but also by taking advantage of the ActivityPub relay protocol, which I have tweaked a bit to serve my cause. About that reach: I know it can be better than 950+ remote servers where each server may have more than 20 members, but it is something.
7. I published a personal-political polemic essay amidst all the crazy standards I set up for myself. I hope you read it. It’s just me cussing privileged people out.
8. I created a space to spread my politics freely every week through my articles, and that is an achievement for me.
9. I haven’t lost sight of where I am going and what I am creating, so Alhamdulillah I have not answered the impulse to create a new Threads account.
10. I miss you. Genuinely. I am writing this update partly because nobody enables my delusions on the Fediverse the way you do! I miss the attention, to be really honest; I’m still blaming my mother for that, actually. But anyways. I don’t care if it wasn’t genuine; even if it wasn’t, I love that people went out of their way to express that they cared.

With all that being said, I am also in the middle of searching for and approaching people to be part of this project, to help with design and graphics for mutualaidspace.org (it is still using my brand identity, welp), the basic admin of the website because the site needs a revamp, and general derangement tolerance. I need a team of people who know how deranged I am. Respectfully.

Contact me if you want to help. Straight away. Just contact meeeee.

Building all of this while broke is, in fact, a core part of the experience. So. June is the month I was born, and I’d really like to spend it not thinking about whether I can afford groceries. With IDR (Indonesian Rupiah) consistently going to hell, I’m hoping the monthly minimum of $375 can cover the entire month.

Monthly pledges are the most sustainable way to support this. One-off contributions also help. Sharing my post or my beautiful Canva poster also helps greatly.