About

what this is

blackbirb.dev is my sheet. It is where I write about making the web more private, more secure, faster and decentralized, and where I put the side projects that come out of trying to do that.

I have been building for the web since 2009 — agencies, ecommerce, frontend platform work — which is long enough to have shipped most of the things I now complain about. That is not a disclaimer, it is the qualification. More about me on b3nnu3.

what to find here

Posts about the things that turn out to matter once a site has to be maintained rather than launched: performance that survives the third marketing tag, frontends that do not need a rewrite every two years, self-hosting, the fediverse, and the parts of privacy that are engineering rather than paperwork. Some of it is about the projects below. Some of it is cats.

what to expect

Nothing on a schedule. Posts appear when something is worth writing down, which is irregularly and in bursts. I would rather publish four things a year that were worth the disk than forty that were worth the streak.

cadence

irregular, on purpose

feed

/feed.xml

fediverse

follow from your own instance — in progress

otherwise

bookmark it and come back

helpbotexe

helpdotexe.org

The backstage for a group of Twitch streamers who run joint charity streams — real money for causes like children’s cancer aid, raised live, across a dozen people’s calendars.

Running one of those events means holding six things at once: who is live and when, what the overlay is showing, what the donation total actually is, what the bot just said in chat, and where the current version of that asset went. The normal answer is a spreadsheet, a pinned Discord message and somebody shouting. This is the replacement.

planning

events, participants and schedule

donations

betterplace webhooks, as events rather than screenshots

twitch

the channel watches, the bot talks — two identities

discord

the same commands, where the crew already is

eventlog

every follow, sub, raid and donation in one feed

obs

browser sources and docks, driven from the backstage

assets

the overlay’s images, video and audio, versioned

wiki

the crew’s own documentation, in the app

how it is hosted

On Uberspace. Shared machines, one host, pay what you think it is worth — no regions to pick, no dashboard trying to sell you a managed anything, no bill that scales with somebody else’s growth projections. helpbotexe runs there too.

That arrangement should not feel radical. It does, which is most of what is wrong with hosting in 2026.

Nothing here measures you and there is no banner, because there is nothing to ask you for. The long version — including the parts less flattering than “we collect nothing” — is on privacy. The source is on codeberg.org/b3nnu3.