I should get a dumb domain
A few days ago, I was browsing boorus, those websites that aggregate images with tags, looking for images of
anime girls wearing sneakers. Yes, just that, very simplistic and exactly what you'd expect from me
nowadays. And I ended up on an artist named shika, often "shika-illust"1.
They enjoy drawing pinups of girls with sneakers. Predictable with beauty standards and revealing clothes,
but I found it very enjoyable nonetheless. One of their most common drawings were what, for me, felt like
magazine covers, titled "SNKR GIRL", or "SNEAKER GIRL", despite the kinda creepy tagline of "A realistic and
ideal girl", the idea of a magazine about sneaker culture for and by women captured my imagination. But of
course, I am not going to launch a magazine, yet the name remained in my head, until I thought "What if I
bought a domain?"
I have had that idea in the past, I was the owner of "agatha.gay", but after two failed attempts of hosting
my own instance for fedi, I left it to expire. But now? Now I had a blog, and a renewed interest in smaller
fedi instances, I could finally move away from the pains of akkoma (sorry akkoma fans, the admin interface
is really lacking), add my own emojis without breaking lynn's instance, and block annoying instances myself.
So I took the plunge, spent a day choosing the exact domain, before ending on snkrgirl.cfd. If you are
unfamiliar, and I believe most people are, CFD stands for "Clothing, Fashion and Designer", I had never seen
anyone using it, but it was appropriate and very cheap, just US$1.28 on Porkbun, perfect.
Time to make fedi work
I had a friend who already offered me a server to host stuff, so I reached out to them again to get
this going (thank you Celeste). I had decided on GoToSocial with its promises of being reliable and
simple, meant for small instances with one or a few users, exactly what I wanted. Sure, less features than
akkoma, but I was willing to make the sacrifice. The setup was very simple, the documentation is superb, and
after asking Celeste to review my nginx configuration, something I am still afraid of, I was good to go.
If you know this blog, you likely follow me on fedi, so you know it has all gone well, really the only issue
I have is that a few remote emojis refuse to ever work, no idea why because it isn't the size, some just
do not work at all. I'm using the Phanpy frontend since GtS does not come with one, and I have had no
problems. Amazing.
I moved my blog to it, it's on the apex domain, and it is also the account domain for the instance. Which
is why you may see me as "@agatha@snkrgirl.cfd", despite the instance being on gts.snkrgirl.cfd. It's by
design, meant to read "Agatha, Sneaker Girl", even if people always tell me they read "Snake Girl", which
I retroactively adopted as intended and got an icon for it with a snake wearing sneakers, thank you Jenny.
I should make this, and that!
Later I decided I should embark on a new personal project, something to start and never finish. That would
be a sneaker gallery, a website to display all my sneakers, both for others, and for myself. Imagining I
could have dozens or hundreds one day, this would make it easier to search for colors, brands, and all that
information. After deciding on Blazor as the technology to power it, and with Gemini guiding me (no vibe
coding, I actually wanted to learn Blazor by example). I... had the working website in a day, and later
added some details like advanced filters. I completed a personal project, insane. I still have some other
features to add, namely localization in Portuguese, but it is mostly done. I add sneakers myself by editing
a JSON file and downloading images from StockX for that cool 360° look, when available. You can check it on
gallery.snkrgirl.cfd.
I was incredibly surprised by how much I could actually do, the dumb domain idea actually got me excited
about this stuff, and it wasn't that hard, even if the server isn't hosted by me (I still set up nginx
myself, however). I am very happy with the outcome, and excited to see what else I can do with snkrgirl.
The future of this blog
That sounded ominous, but no bad news, I actually read a blog post by a Brazilian these weeks, about a very mundane moment of his life, going to the pharmacy2. Yet I found it extremely enjoyable, so much so that I had an idea: what if instead of waiting for big topics once a month, I actually try writing every week? Whatever is on my mind, be it grandiose, or tiny. Anything at all! And while it isn't a promise, it's a goal for me. I'm already a day late with this one, but while I use Sunday as the first day of the week, let's pretend I don't, and it's the last day of the week, so I'm on time. I hope that if you read this blog, you also have fun with my posts, and I can be that weird friend you have that is into sneakers. Apparently this space really lacks trans girls, so I am proudly filling this niche. Onwards to 2026.
Footnotes
- #鹿[Shika] on Pixiv Fanbox ↩
- A atenção é mesmo o grande diferencial do século 21, por Augusto Campos, em Trilux↩
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