pico.sh! Saturday, August 8, 2026 Wow, pico.sh looks very enticing. I found it last night after reading Brennan’s post, Free Speech and the IndieWeb, which discusses the reasons he doesn’t use Cloudflare. See also his longer post on this topic. I have been feeling a little dirty about using Cloudflare for hosting this little indie blog. Plus, Cloudflare frustrated me this week when it wouldn’t update my broken site (my fault for breaking it; Cloudflare’s for not letting me fix it). So Brennan’s post provoked me to look for alternatives. I searched for options that allow deployment of static sites via rsync, and I soon beheld pico.sh. I’d signed up and had my site deployed to pico pages in a matter of minutes. Truly, less than ten minutes, including the time to sign up and pay for a year of pico plus, which is only two bucks a month. This is my deployment command: rsync --delete -rv ./public/ pgs.sh:/blog Et voila: https://sal-blog.pgs.sh/ What I’m liking so far Other than reading docs, it seems I interact with pico.sh entirely over ssh and rsync. Auth is handled via ssh key. If I want to chat with the community, I use IRC with pico’s provided bouncer. Account notifications are provided via a unique RSS feed. This is all so geeky and awesome. Deploys use actual rsync, so I can see which specific files are being updated, how much data is being transferred, etc. I was wishing for that kind of transparency when Cloudflare’s wrangler tool was refusing to update my site this week. This also gives me control over the deployment: I can upload only specific files or glob patterns, use --dry-run to preview the operation, etc. Speaking to some of Brennan’s points, pico.sh has a Code of Content, which currently reads: Don’t upload content if someone else might own the copyright to it Don’t upload gore Don’t upload “hate speech” (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.) Don’t upload material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime Don’t upload illegal content, nudity, or adult sexual content Don’t upload content to spam users Don’t upload content to employ social engineering tactics in an effort to trick users Don’t impersonate someone else In short, don’t be an asshole. I like supporting a service that is willing to take a stand on that. The founders are active on HN, and I like their vibe. Their blog is filled with transparency about the evolution of the product, and they use RFCs with their community to help guide the direction. There’s a lot to like so far, and I’m only an hour into this! What’s next I’ll keep poking around to learn more, run some tests, etc. I need to get redirects working. It looks like they use the same format as Cloudflare. Wonderful. If I’m still feeling this good about it in a day or so, I might just point my domain at it!