Obligatory "Leaflet" Intro

Hey there, fellow denizens and guests of... the World Republic of Letters, I guess?

That's to say that, in other words, I'm a writer. A bad writer? Worse, a poet. In my country, poets are not deemed writers, you're a writer and/or poet. I think quite like an insider and write rather like an outsider. Bear with me - I bundle more than one contradiction.

If you somehow want to learn more about me and my writing and you'd rather not install another browser (like Buran) just to access my Gemspace capsule (gemini://princepspoesis.gemcities.com), follow this page as I port my texts published there on Gemini (as well as Gopher: gopher://gopher.princeps-poesis.xyz/) and perhaps write also more shorter texts just for this page, as the character limits of vanilla Bluesky are driving me crazy! I used to post walls of text on my Facebook (which might sound genuinely crazy, but most of Romania is addicted to Facebook, and most of its writers don't write anywhere else), Twitter/X/Bluesky don't really suit my verbose style of writing (nor Romanian, for that matter), and now I have Hubzilla (https://hub.princeps-poesis.xyz) and some other fediverse accounts where I have no or very relaxed character limits.

Why I'm writing right now on Leaflet/ATproto/Bluesky instead of there in the fediverse?

Well, I had a brief period of more intense activity on Bluesky and been thinking of coming back, seeing how, despite the "age verification" clusterfuck (I'm using right now alternative, more privacy-respecting AppView front-ends, like TOKIMEKI and Red Dwarf, instead of vanilla Bluesky or Mu Social, the latter associated with my still current PDS, eurosky.social), a lot of artistic people from overseas are still using Bluesky, so I guess I could try doing some networking (at which I royally suck: my conflicts with local literary gatekeepers have prevented me from getting translation deals and festival invites, but more about that in my upcoming text, "Small Politics of Literature"), and if not, I can still make use of #BookSky to keep track of recent poetry books that will sooner or later make their way into Princeps Poesis (https://princeps-poesis.xyz/), my lifelong project, an exhaustive database of poetry books from around the world.

Regarding the latter, I'm still only less than halfway through porting my dataset of over 50,000 Romanian poetry books, hosted on an old Blogger page (https://proiectulpoezierom.blogspot.com/), to my new site based on MediaWiki (just like Wikipedia), self-hosted here in the EU. Due to work and personal life, my sparse free time over the last couple of years has been divided between my self-hosting projects and other tech efforts - switching from Windows to Linux, and then from Linux to OpenBSD (one of the most secure operating systems in the world), as well as from Android to GrapheneOS, in addition to learning lots of other privacy and security pro tips and, last but not least, getting into decentralized social media, which is also still a WIP.

Speaking of which, I am about to migrate my Bluesky/Eurosky account to a PDS of my own (it's already online: https://atmo.princeps-poesis.xyz) and from there on I'll go on self-hosting as much of the ATproto stack as I can (some people like to say that Bluesky is easier to use than the likes of Mastodon, but in fact that's only true for casual users; if you want to self-host, it helps that ActivityPub implementations are monolithic).

Why my new obsessive focus on self-hosting after years of putting up with Facebook? I was fed up already with Facebook's abusive policies and the constant fear of getting moderated and banned (I'm expecting any day now to no longer have access to any of my Meta accounts due to "age verification", but I just stopped caring), now I'm really not willing to accept ANY threats or silencing from anyone, big corpos and not. The other day, I got moderated on a Mastodon instance because I confronted a Zionist sympathiziser, the kind who conflates any and all anti-Zionism with antisemitism (certain of my key literary influences were Jewish poets like Gherasim Luca and Jerome Rothenberg, who chose staying in Europe and NA rather than relocating as colonizers). So now I got another project on my hands - moving that Mastodon activity to a more lightweight instance of my own (based on Starling or snac2 rather than the much heavier Mastodon)... As I had decided to keep my Hubzilla just for my literary archive - which also still waits to be ported from my Facebook archive files and other sources!

That being said... Life's still beautiful, and I'm aware it's a privilege to be able to cope with these all too great challenges... Which is to say, I wish there wasn't such a hard price to pay for a modicum of freedom and security, or some semblances of them...

I think I'm done writing here on Leaflet (let's say it feels kind of nice, although I'm not a big fan of the Wordpress-ish formatting), started writing on the edge of a beautiful marsh and finished 2 hours later, while listening to a neat little fountain under my window - suitable for bodies of water like you and me.

21st of July, 2026

Dobroești/Bucharest, Romania