Computers. The Internet. Are too complicated.

But they don’t have to be.

Grumpystack means:

• Use less [ software | compute | storage | net ]
• Local-first
• Local-scale
• Tinker-friendly
• Often Old and Boring
• Privacy, Security, Sovereignty
• Pets, not cattle
• Honest uptime
• Slow-UX

Software doesn’t have to be a hyperscale, attention-farming, power-centralising, constantly-changing, urgent, expensive data-leech; that captures and subverts your human drive to engage meaningfully with other humans, art, and science. That’s the venture-capitalism talking.

Computers can be simple, beautiful expressions of human ingenuity and honest connectedness. This site is about some grumpy alternatives to the hypercloud.

Some Grumpy Building-Blocks

Any or all of the items below might intended to become their own page. But for now, we’ll have to make do with hints and whispers.

Email You probably don’t need Google Mail. There are other options, but I self-host my email on an OpenBSD server. Inspired by MWL’s RYOMS and Sivers’ TI. Git You probably don’t need Microsoft Github. Git is a distributed VCS. There are other options, but I use ssh to access my private repos and http to share public ones. (If you’re going to try sharing a git repo on the web for the first time, you may want to read man 1 git-update-server-info.) CI/CD You probably don’t need Jenkins or Github Actions, especially if you’re building something small and self-hosting your git server. You can do a lot with cron (crontab(1)), git hooks, and your existing run-tests.sh. Personal Documents You probably don’t need Google Drive. I write docs in plaintext with my text-editor and in fancy-formats with LibreOffice. I share them with folks using SyncThing. Documentation You probably don’t need StackOverflow. Have you seen how good the man pages are on BSD? Or the info pages in GNU? Learn about manpages with

man
intro

or about info pages with

info
info

. (Some non-slackware linux distributions don’t come with the docs packages installed by default. If you’ve read this far, you’ll want to either install them or switch distros.) News and Global Community You probably don’t need Facebook, TwiXter, or whatever notifaction-ridden "news" apps you have on your phone. There are still human journalists out there who write regular newsletters, which you can get on a predictable cadence by email. For esoteric global nerd-communities, there’s mastodon. You can get the good bits of this stuff without being force-fed by an attention-mining engagement-maximizer.

Questions? Comments? Email me at this domain, or toot at me here.

This site best viewed using lynx or eww.