Welcome to the realm of The Canadian Hermit!
The Canadian Hermit has a long history online, starting somewhere between fifteen and twenty years ago as "thehermit" on the internet forums site WTF.com and in their at the time official chat, #wtf.com on the IRC server EFNet. (OK, I didn't start out as "thehermit", but used my real first name. However, it wasn't all that long before I decided to go the slightly more anonymous route and switch to "thehermit".)
After a multi-year break from WTF.com and IRC, I started into a bunch of local networking and systems administration, so for support I connected to Freenode IRC, or, at least the original version of it. If I remember correctly, I originally registered as "thehermit".
In May 2021, there were huge changes at Freenode and multiple staff resigned. In what seemed to be no time at all, these ex-staffers had organized and started a new IRC network which they called Libera.Chat. As soon as I knew about it, I had registered at Libera.Chat, again as "thehermit". However, it wasn't long before I changed my registered nick to "thecdnhermit". And no, "cdn" does not stand for "content delivery network", it's shorthand for "Canadian"!
Somewhere in this period of time, I decided to attempt to set up my own IRC server. At the time I didn't own the domain "thecdnhermit.com", so I simply used one of the domains I did have. Then one day it clicked that I should purchase this domain, and now "thecdnhermit" is more than just an IRC nick, it is the domain that hosts my public IRC server and related services.
More recently, I decided to set up a forum site. Within a few hours, I had a basic forums set up, thanks to phpBB and their easy to use forum software! I figured the forums could be used to document major tech discussions we have in IRC, or just be a different way to have certain conversations.
So again, welcome! Join us in chat, and/or the forums if you like! I hope you enjoy your stay!