The Law of the Land
To be a Digital Homestead, a site must meet three criteria:
- Own the Domain: You must own the URL (e.g., `yourname.com`). If your address is `facebook.com/yourname`, you are a sharecropper, not a homesteader.
- Own the Content: The text and images must reside on legal storage you pay for or control, not on servers that claim a worldwide license to your IP.
- Portability: You must be able to pack up the homestead and move it to a different host without losing your history.
The Labor of Maintenance
Homesteading is hard work. Unlike a Facebook profile (which is easy but precarious), a Digital Homestead requires "Digital Gardening"—patching servers, updating HTML, and paying renewal fees. This friction is a feature, not a bug; the effort of maintenance creates a deeper sense of ownership and permanence.
Field Notes
The "About Me" Page: The hearth of the homestead. On social media, your identity is a standardized box (Profile Pic + Bio). On a homestead, the "About Me" page is a sovereign declaration of self, unconstrained by character limits or UI templates.
The "Blogroll": Before algorithms, neighbors linked to neighbors. The Blogroll was the homesteader's way of defining their community—a hand-curated map of the digital village.
Ephemera
The Digital Homestead is the only defense against "Platform Murder." When Twitter dies, the Tweeter is homeless. When the server crashes, the Homesteader just restores from backup.