I empathize with the author and found the post to be a interesting and concrete example of what it's _actually like_ to try to publish a blog to Mastodon, which

I empathize with the author and found the post to be a interesting and concrete example of what it's _actually like_ to try to publish a blog to Mastodon, which is something that I have thought about and read about in abstract. So, thank you for writing this up. One thing to consider would be to try to use Caddy [0], or a tool like localias [1], as a local https proxy. You would be able to run both the mastodon server and your blog software on the same computer, addressable via local-only urls like "https://blog.test https://blog.test" and "https://mastodon.test https://mastodon.test" and have everything work. These tools manage the certificates for you transparently and you don't need to worry about anything being exposed publicly. I'd be curious to know why the author didn't try this, they seem to be quite knowledgeable of other web technologies so I have to assume there's a problem that I'm not seeing here. [0] https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ [1] https://github.com/peterldowns/localias https://github.com/peterldowns/localias