How times have changed– they always do. Just about one year ago, Samantha and I were celebrating the first anniversary of Portlandish (pdx.sh), reflecting on the joy of building a small, vibrant community. We spoke of how fulfilling it was to offer a little corner of the internet free from ads, fostering conversations about science, art, activism, and, of course, cats.

Today, we announce that Portlandish will cease operations on March 6, 2025. This decision comes in response to the shifting political landscape in the United States, including potential changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which could make it increasingly difficult for small platforms like ours to operate safely and sustainably.

As of today, November 25th, 2023, Samantha and I are celebrating a full year of operating our Mastodon server, pdx.sh. In this time, we’ve grown to a community of 27 active users! This journey has been incredibly rewarding, as we’ve watched our local community flourish gradually, with minimal marketing or promotion. It’s fulfilling to offer this little corner of the internet—a space free from sponsored posts and advertisements—where people can freely engage. We hope our volunteer efforts inspire others to contribute their time and resources towards making a positive impact in their own unique ways.

I think I’m pretty alright at taking notes in LogSeq on little projects that I do for fun. The problem is that, for someone who has starry-eyed ambitions of being a writer of some level of competence, I’m awful at turning those notes into a coherent story that others will be interested in. I have a tendency to get lost in side tangents and get distracted by the next shiny project that I want to do without any regard for writing up what I’ve already done for the benefit of anyone other than myself. It’s also just like… a lot of work, you know? So I started thinking, what if I was as lazy as possible and took a few of my existing blog ideas and notes, dumped them into a LLM (Claude+), cleaned them up a little bit, posted those, and then did a write up on the experience, which I would of course also dump right back into an LLM. Let’s see just how lazy I can be!