Goodbye Link Tree

The crap we are going through right now with Twitter has made me re-evaluate a lot of the things that I use in my life. One of these is Linktr.ee a site that I have used for several years as a catch-all for all of the various social and project links associated with me. I’ve owned the domain Belgha.st and Belghast.com and for eons I simply had an apache redirect pointing at my Link Tree page. It gave me a clean and simple way to link someone to all of my things at once in a very mobile-friendly format. However, if tomorrow it vanished… I would honestly have trouble cobbling together all of the links again because that has been the place where I have largely stored them.

This idea of hosting my own links page had been living rent-free in my head for a while now, but never really coalesced into action until I saw this video from EposVox. While he provides a number of solutions that would be fine including just firing up a NeoCities website to host all of your content. It was not however the solution I was looking for. One of the things that I always enjoyed about Link Tree was just how fast I could add links to it, and how everything had a nice clean look and feel. This sent me down a rabbit hole of searching for solutions and I think I landed upon something. I even went so far as to share the solution I found with EposVox who has since created a Shorts video about it as well.

The tool that I landed upon is called LittleLink Custom and it is essentially a self-hosted version of Link Tree. It took all of a few minutes to set up the website, and by default exists in a multi-user mode so you could allow other friends to sign up for their own faux link tree pages that you were hosting. I did not necessarily need that functionality which is cool because it allows you to configure it in a way to automagically redirect people to a single profile. I already had space carved out for Belgha.st and Belghast.com, so I removed my .htaccess file that was bouncing people to Link Tree and started installing the software.

The most basic version of the site requires Php 8.0 or higher and SqlLite which is fine for a smaller install. It also supports MySQL if you want a more robust multi-user environment. I think the longest part of the setup was actually uploading the files to my host. There are a LOT of files, so I would highly suggest uploading the archive and then going through your host’s backend to extract those files otherwise you will be FTPing like 8000 tiny files forever. After minimal fiddling, I was in and configuring my link page. All that was left was for me to pick a theme I liked, install it, and then start adding all of my links.

One of the things I specifically dig about Littlelink custom is that it has support for a wide variety of options already out of the box, but you can easily configure custom links as well. I wish there was a bit more support for adding custom quick icons but I have faith that over time this will be adding more features. For what I really need, which is the ability to add headings, and sets of links… this will do swimmingly. Now the real hard part is going to begin, which is finding every place I had linked to my Link Tree and replacing it with the new Belgha.st link.

Since the software technically supports many different “users” I went ahead and created one for AggroChat and have migrated the Link Tree I had for the podcast over to it as well. Mostly this is just a place to keep a running list of all of the podcast mirrors as well as the most basic social information. I’ve even created a “Bel Gaming” one where I am going to experiment with using it as a dumping ground for the various video game-related profiles and accounts to make it easier to link up with me. This is very much a work in progress as many of the platforms don’t really have a profile page you can link to. You can add blocks of text to your link page, which is handy but I am going to have to fiddle with how that actually looks in practice.

The slow death of Twitter has really made me evaluate the tools that I use on a daily basis. I think we are heading towards me potentially just paying for a server somewhere out in the cloud and migrating all of my resources to that instead of paying for piecemeal hosting. It would be a big change, but it is one that I think is on the horizon. I am just not sure how much I want to trust “free” services anymore. This could of course be a wild overreaction, but it would be nice to feel like I have a bit more control over the fate of the things I enjoy. Even if it isn’t a scenario where a rich manchild destroys it… it could be something as simple as Google deciding the product is no longer viable. We started out on the internet with needing to host everything for ourselves, and I wonder if I will be moving back to that again.