Last week I wrote about leaving DigitalOcean after they pledged $3 million to the foundation behind DHH’s Omarchy. I’ve been on UpCloud for a bit more than a week now and it’s been working great! This morning I moved the last thing over (my keith.business pds) and deleted my DigitalOcean account.
In that same week DigitalOcean found a way to make me angrier. Not only have they given money to fascists, they’ve stopped giving small amounts of money ($50!) to other projects, and they’ve screwed up CSS-Tricks, one of the best places on the whole internet.
A week and a bit on UpCloud
Everything from the last post is still running on the one machine: my site, atmoBB, pollen.place, and the rest. Nothing has fallen over. Deploys work the same as they did before, and I’ve barely thought about the server, which is what I want from a server.
The last piece was one of my weird PDS instances that I use for ~5 accounts, but keith.business needed to make the move.
What they’re doing to CSS-Tricks
If you don’t know the history: Chris Coyier started CSS-Tricks in 2007, and DigitalOcean bought it in 2022. In February 2023 they laid off the people working on it and the site sat there for a year. In June 2024 they brought Geoff Graham back as editor. He got it publishing again, two to five articles a week, mostly by himself.
The last article went up on August 31. On Monday, Geoff explained why it’s been quiet. His last few invoices haven’t been paid, he can’t get an answer out of DigitalOcean, and he can’t afford to work for free for months.
Geoff has been doing this for 12-ish years. He says he isn’t angry, and that he’s more hopeful than anything else. In the comments he describes it as “talking to a wall.”
I’m not Geoff, so I get to be angry 😡.
Declan Chidlow put the two stories next to each other . This is DHH, in the post announcing DigitalOcean’s money:
But the part of this patronage that really made me smile was how quickly it all came together. I reached out to Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean’s CEO, on X on Wednesday. We had a call that same night. I sent a proposal on Saturday. By Sunday, we’d finalized everything.
Wednesday to Sunday. DHH sends the CEO a message on X and has $3 million four days later. The editor of a site DigitalOcean owns can’t get an invoice paid or an email answered. Declan says Geoff has been trying to raise this with them for months.
And the $50 😡😡😡😡😡
Also in Declan’s post: Bart Piotrowski, who works on Flathub’s infrastructure, said DigitalOcean cancelled its sponsorship of the GNOME and Flathub VMs in August. It was $50 a month.
$50 a month is $600 a year. The Omarchy pledge is $1 million a year. One year of it would cover those VMs for 1,666 years.
So there’s $3 million for a guy who writes that you should deport Romani people like you’d shoot wolves, and there isn’t $50 a month for GNOME and Flathub, and there isn’t whatever it costs to pay the one person running CSS-Tricks.
What CSS-Tricks is to me
CSS-Tricks is where I’ve learned so many cool new techniques. When I search for how to do something in CSS and there’s a CSS-Tricks link in the results, that’s the one getting clicked. I don’t open three tabs to compare. There are very few sites I trust like that.
If I ever post about CSS here, like :has(), grid, @scope, or @property, I’m trying to bring the energy of a CSS-Tricks tutorial.
The flexbox guide has probably been open in a tab on every web developer’s computer at some point. The Almanac has a page for just about every property and selector. And for the last two years the new stuff has kept coming, two to five articles a week, because Geoff kept it coming.
There aren’t many places like this left. Andy Bell wrote You’ll miss publishers when they’re gone this week, and Declan ended his post with “there are very few quality publications about the web left, and it would be a major blow to lose another.”
Anyway
Geoff posted again today: The front-end community is still alive and beautiful. People have been loud about this all week. Kevin Powell made a video, Eric Bailey thinks CSS-Tricks could be a co-op, and Geoff says “there has been a little bit of movement with all your help. People are listening.”
So keep being loud! When someone in his comments asked how to help, Geoff said nice comments are the best support, “that and tagging DO where they pay attention.”
DigitalOcean: pay Geoff.
And if you’re still a customer, the last post is how I left, one site at a time and I do really recommend UpCloud .