Farhad Uneci

I have a Telegram channel called @ferilog. Had one. I'm still figuring out which tense is right.

I started it on a Tuesday in August 2022. No big announcement, no plan. I just wanted a place to put things I found interesting: links, thoughts, notes, random observations. Over time it became something closer to a public journal. It started with 10 or 20 members, all close friends. By the time I deleted it, it had grown to around 100. The size was never the point. The point was the habit. Every time I found something worth saving, opening Telegram and dropping it into @ferilog was one of the first things I'd do.

1,418 days of that.

Last night I was showing someone the channel. I'd just updated the profile picture and was mid-sentence explaining what it meant to me, genuinely enthusiastic. Then I noticed the group chat attached to it had been quiet for a while. Nobody was writing in there anyway. I thought: why keep a dead group chat? I'll just delete it.

I went into settings. Clicked Delete.

The channel was gone.

On mobile, Telegram shows a 5-second countdown before you can confirm something like this. A small grace period for the inevitable "wait, what." On the laptop client, that timer didn't appear. I confirmed. The channel disappeared. All of it: every post, every link, every note I'd saved there over four years.

I sat there for a few seconds not saying anything.

The thing that made it worse: I've spent years rolling my eyes at people who click through scary confirmation dialogs without reading them. "Are you sure you want to delete this?" Yes, click. "This action cannot be undone." Yes, click. I had opinions about this. I thought it was careless.

I'd clicked Delete on the wrong thing. Same word in the menu, different action. The timer that would have saved me didn't appear.

1,418 days.

There's a strange timing to all of this. In my first post on this blog, I wrote about exactly this problem with Telegram: the content floats, it's hard to find, and the whole thing could disappear if the platform changes its mind. I didn't expect to prove my own point quite so quickly, and quite so personally.

It also made me feel even more strongly about Posthaven's pledge. I want this blog to stay online. Not just while I'm around to pay for it, but as a record of a life in software, here even after I'm not. Yesterday reminded me why that matters.

The channel is back: t.me/ferilog. Better formatted content, a backup strategy, and considerably more respect for confirmation dialogs.

The memories are gone. The habit isn't.

To new memories. 🍻

I'm writing this on a couch in Istanbul, looking out at the city and the sea. There's piano music on Spotify. It's a good moment to start something.

A few weeks ago I was reading Garry's post about not trying to boil the ocean when I clicked a link that took me to Sam Altman's blog. From there I found Posthaven. I hadn't come across it before, but I read the pledge and something clicked. They commit to keeping your blog running forever. Not "until we run out of funding" or "until we get acquired." Just, forever. Your words don't disappear.

That was enough! I bought farhaduneci.com the same day and set this up.

The reason the pledge hit me so hard is that I've lost a lot of writing. I've been trying to have a consistent online presence for years. For a long time I wrote on Telegram (I still do, at @ferilog, but Telegram has a fundamental problem: the content floats. Nobody really reads it there, old posts are nearly impossible to find, and the whole thing could disappear if the platform changes its mind. Before Telegram I had blogs on other platforms. Those platforms are now off the internet.

Living in Iran made it worse. Months of internet cutoffs, filtered domains, VPN dependency, and connections that dropped at inconvenient times made it easy to lose momentum and hard to justify building anything that required being consistently online. At some point, you stop trying to maintain something when the infrastructure underneath it keeps being pulled away.

Then I moved to Istanbul.

I came here as an expat, and the best way I can describe it is that it feels like a fresh install of Linux. I've got nothing but my basic bash tools. No plugins, no config, no familiar aliases. I'm building my setup from scratch: new routines, new social circles, new city. Istanbul is a beautiful place to do that in. I look at it every day from this couch (the city, the sea, boats moving slowly in the distance) and think: okay, here we go.

Starting this blog is part of that setup. I want a place on the internet that is actually mine. Not rented from a platform that might disappear, not buried in a messaging app, not dependent on an algorithm deciding whether it's worth surfacing. Just a page with my name on it that I can point to, add to, and trust will still be there in ten years.

I don't have a strict editorial plan. I want to write about building things: software, habits, a life in a new country. About what expat life actually looks like from the inside. About engineering, ideas that stuck, tools I use and why. The blog might go in directions I'm not expecting, and that's fine.

I'm also starting to build more of a presence at farhaduneci.com. This blog and that site are the first real steps toward an online identity I should have built a long time ago. Better late than never.

As Garry said: I can't boil the ocean. But let's boil some lakes.