I Went Quiet. The Bots Didn’t.

So… I’m still alive.

Looking at my Hive account over roughly the past six months, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d either rage-quit Hive, finally found that tropical island without internet (which sounds a lot better in theory than it probably is in reality), or got absorbed into one of the servers I’ve been maintaining all these years. None of those things happened, although I will admit that the tropical island occasionally sounded rather tempting.

The truth is much less exciting, and at the same time much more life-changing.

Life simply happened.

Now, before anyone starts wondering whether something new happened with our daughter, no, nothing like that. Most of you already know she’s been in a wheelchair for almost a year now, and I wrote about that when our world suddenly looked very different. What I don’t think I ever really wrote about is everything that comes after that announcement, because as it turns out, getting the wheelchair was almost the easy part.

The real work started afterwards.

You don’t just adapt to a wheelchair. You adapt your house. Then your routines. Then your planning. Then your expectations. Then, somewhere along the way, you realise you haven’t actually been adapting the house at all, you’ve been adapting your entire life, and the house just happened to be one of the easier projects.

Doorways suddenly become interesting. Steps become annoying. Furniture somehow always seems to be exactly where it shouldn’t be. Things that used to take five minutes now require planning worthy of a small military operation, and I have developed a relationship with the local DIY store that is probably bordering on unhealthy. I’m fairly certain the people working there nod at me before I’ve even entered the building, probably wondering which wall I’m about to tear down this time.

While all of that was going on, the economy decided to keep doing… well… economy things, I switched jobs, family life kept demanding the attention it deserves, and somewhere in the middle of all that I discovered that twenty-four hours in a day is simply an insult to anyone trying to keep all those plates spinning. Whoever designed that limitation clearly never had children, servers, home renovations and paperwork all competing for attention at the same time.

Something had to give.

Unfortunately, that something turned out to be… me being visible on Hive.

Now, here’s the funny part.

From the outside, it probably looked like I’d disappeared.

From my side of the keyboard, I simply stopped posting.

There’s quite a difference.

Because while my blog has been collecting considerably more dust than new posts, the infrastructure never really stopped. In fact, I’d almost say it quietly kept improving while nobody was paying attention.

The things that never stopped doing what they’re supposed to do include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Botlord is still happily doing Botlord things.
• The Hive witnesses are still producing blocks.
• The Hive Engine witnesses are still online.
• The Magi nodes has been quietly doing its job as well.
• The tipping bots never stopped tipping.
• The other bots never stopped… well… botting.
• All the tools have remained online.
• Some of those tools even received a rather decent facelift, especially:
  • https://hiveearnings.botlord.eu
  • https://hts.botlord.eu
• Servers kept receiving updates.
• Databases kept receiving maintenance.
• Monitoring kept monitoring, which is exactly the kind of boring reliability you want from infrastructure.

It’s funny how the work nobody notices is often the work that quietly matters the most. Nobody celebrates uptime. Nobody writes posts about databases behaving exactly as expected. People only notice infrastructure when it breaks, which, thankfully, it didn’t.

The same goes for Hive itself.

Just because I wasn’t writing didn’t mean I stopped believing.

I’m still powering up whenever I can.

I’m still accumulating Hive whenever circumstances allow it.

I’m still supporting the ecosystem.

I’m still convinced that decentralisation matters just as much today as it did when I started building here all those years ago.

And yes, before someone asks, even my Actifit reports have practically disappeared. That wasn’t some philosophical statement against walking, although I suppose sitting behind a keyboard does burn some calories if you type angrily enough. My walks simply became another casualty of life being… well… life. Between work, family, hospital visits, renovations, paperwork, trying to remember which appointment is on which day and occasionally attempting to get a reasonable amount of sleep, those daily walks quietly slipped out of the routine, and if I’m honest, I miss them more than I expected.

So…

Am I back?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Am I going back to posting two or three times a day like I apparently used to, because looking back I’m honestly not sure how I even managed that?

Not a chance.

I like setting realistic goals these days.

Will I post every week?

Hopefully.

Will I miss a week here and there?

Almost certainly.

Life hasn’t suddenly become less busy. We’re still adapting, the house still isn’t entirely finished, we’re still figuring out what our new normal looks like, and I suspect that’s going to remain a work in progress for quite some time. And maybe that’s okay. Not everything has to be “finished” before you start doing the things you enjoy again.

Because I do miss writing.

I miss sharing ideas.

I miss reading what all of you have been up to.

I even miss those wonderfully civil discussions where everyone politely agrees with each other… alright, that last part may have been a slight exaggeration.

The point is, I miss being part of the conversation instead of simply making sure the lights stay on behind the scenes.

So that’s the plan.

No grand comeback.

No impossible promises.

Just getting back into the rhythm, one post at a time, one block at a time, while continuing to do everything I’ve always done in the background.

If there’s one thing the past year has taught me, it’s that life doesn’t wait until you’re ready, it just keeps moving, and the best you can do is move with it, occasionally complain about it over a cup of coffee that’s gone cold because you got distracted halfway through drinking it, and then keep building anyway.

To everyone who reached out over the past months, wondered where I’d gone, kept using the tools, supported the witnesses, delegated, or simply kept this wonderful little corner of the internet alive while I was mostly lurking instead of talking…

Thank you.

Really.

It means more than you probably realise.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cold coffee to finish, approximately fourteen unfinished projects to continue, and I’m fairly sure the DIY store has started wondering whether I’m alright because I haven’t been there in almost a week.

That probably means I forgot something.

See you around the blockchain.

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All photos are my own, shot on my iPhone and sometimes edited in Lightroom.
AI images? Those are created by me too, using my own prompts.

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