Most of them have it backwards.

The real question

The stuff isn’t the obstacle to moving. The stuff is the reason you haven’t.

Every box you can’t bear to part with is an anchor to a life you say you want to leave. The dining set from the marriage that ended. The bookshelves of books you’ll never re-read. The boxes of cables and adapters for devices you no longer own. The treadmill. The seasonal decor. The skis from the year you tried skiing. (The car!)

You already know this. It’s why the question feels so heavy.

And the heaviness is misplaced. People who have actually had to leave — for war, for politics, for safety, for a love that lived elsewhere — did not pack their dining sets. They went. The shape of every emigrant story across every century is the same: a small bag, a few photographs, a passport, a memory. When the reason to leave is real, the stuff stops being the question. The stuff is what we ask about when we don’t want to ask about the bigger thing.

A few voices worth listening to

George Carlin spent half his career on this. His A Place for My Stuff routine, first recorded in 1981, is the most clarifying ten minutes you can spend on the subject:

“That’s the meaning of life, trying to find a place to keep your stuff. That’s all your house is, think of it, that’s all your house is, it’s a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much goddamn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house.”

Henry David Thoreau, more austerely, in Walden:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplify, simplify.”

Pico Iyer has been based in western Japan since 1987 and writes about how the things you don’t bring are what give you room to become someone different. His The Art of Stillness is short, and worth the afternoon. So is the TED talk of the same name.

These aren’t ascetics. They’re people who noticed, somewhere along the way, that owning less was lighter, not poorer.

The self-storage trap

If the answer to what about my stuff is I’ll put it in storage back in the States — be honest with yourself about what that means.

A 10×10 unit in the US runs about $90 a month in cheaper cities and over $300 in Los Angeles or New York; the national average sits around $130. Over the first year of your new life in Mexico, that’s $1,500 to $3,600 you’re paying to not commit. Over five years it’s $7,500 to $18,000 — and at the end you’ll open the door and find boxes you haven’t touched, full of objects you’ve moved past.

Storage is where stuff goes to be paid rent for. It is the financial expression of I’m not sure.

If you’re not sure, that’s a real signal. Maybe don’t move yet. But don’t move and keep a storage unit. That’s both lives at once, and you’ll do neither well.

What I did

I sold or gave away everything that wouldn’t fit in a backpack. Left a small box of photographs and letters at my sister’s house. Hit the road.

Oddly cathartic.

There is something about starting fresh, especially in a city you don’t yet know. Coming with nothing gave me flexibility — to try neighborhoods, to change my mind, to move a few times in the first months without thinking about logistics. Just throw what little you have in an Uber.

Once I found my apartment in Condesa, I started acquiring things again. Slowly. A chair from La Lagunilla on a Sunday morning. A Huichol yarn painting I bought because I stood in front of it for ten minutes. A black ceramic planter, an alebrije stool, a kettle, a lamp. Each thing in the new apartment is here because I chose it in this life, not because I dragged it across a border out of inertia.

It turns out you don’t need the things you thought you did. And the joy of slowly refurnishing in a new city — at flea markets, at La Lagunilla on Sunday mornings, at San Ángel on Saturdays, at the artesanías markets in every barrio — is itself part of building a new life.

But if you insist

If you’ve read all of this and you’re still going to bring a meaningful amount — there is a way.

The Mexican government allows residents (Temporary or Permanent — not tourists) to import their used household goods duty-free, once, under a permit called the menaje de casa. The certificate is issued at a Mexican consulate while you’re still in the US, costs around USD $195, and is processed in person on weekday mornings. The shipment must arrive in Mexico within six months of your first entry on your residency card. The inventory has to itemize every box, the goods must be used (no new appliances), and a single mistake on the list will hold up the whole shipment at the border.

Most people who actually bring household goods use a professional cross-border moving company that handles the menaje de casa and the customs end-to-end. It’s not cheap — typically thousands of dollars for a household — and it’s not fast. If you decide this is your path, working through it is one of the things I do alongside my clients: the inventory list, the consulate appointment, the timing against your residency card, the company you’ll trust your boxes to.

A closing thought

You’re moving to Mexico because something in your old life wasn’t working anymore. The stuff is part of that old life. Most of it doesn’t deserve to ride along.

Bring the photos. Bring the letters. Bring two boxes of things that genuinely cannot be replaced. Leave the rest behind, with gratitude, and let yourself be light enough to enjoy where you’ve landed.

The other essays here are the digital and social versions of this same idea: Owning your identity on what to do about the email and websites you’ve been renting, and The fediverse on the social piece of leaving lightly.

The land you’re renting on can be sold, changed, or closed without warning. It happened on Posterous, App.net, Google Reader, Vine, and Tumblr. It is happening now on Twitter, and it is happening on Facebook too — where countless people built their main page for a business or a life’s work, and are watching the traffic, the reach, and the neighbors drift away. Nothing stays cool forever. It will happen next wherever the venture capital runs out.

If you’re moving — out of a country, out of a phase of life — those platforms become more fragile, not less. The pieces of your online identity sit on land owned by other people, often in a country you may be leaving. Cross a border and the tethers tighten. This is the portable version of the same lightness What about all my stuff? calls for in the physical world.

“That is why you need to own your little place on the Internet. Otherwise you are always tilling someone else’s land.”
— Om Malik

What owning actually looks like

In practice this is a small set of moving parts, each paid for and portable. I’m increasingly aligned with the digital sovereignty movement — the idea that your data, your mail, and the infrastructure they run on should not be subject to the jurisdiction or surveillance appetites of a government you don’t trust — so I researched each option carefully: the people behind it, the law of the country it operates under, its survivability. The specific providers I use, with prices and reasons, are in the colophon. I picked each one slowly and replaced two along the way; the choices are not casual.

• Domain. A registrar that does this one thing well, with no upsell carousel and no dark patterns.
• Email at your domain. A paid provider whose servers live in a country whose privacy law respects you. Your inbox at your-name@your-domain.com, nothing in the pipe scanned for ad data, calendar and contacts and file storage in the same suite.
• DNS. A small, non-commercial nameserver. There are good nonprofit options that don’t sell you anything, including you.
• A place to put the site. A small, boring, cheap host. Yours.
• Social presence. Something not owned by Meta or X — your handle at your own domain, a follower graph that’s portable, and a host you trust. That’s the fediverse, which is its own essay.

This site runs on a stack like this. Nothing on any page phones home. No Google Fonts, no analytics scripts, no tracking pixels, no comment system that wants your login. The pages load in under a second on a phone with a bad signal because they are small, quiet, static files. It’s how the web used to be, before the platforms swallowed it.

“A publication on Substack is no more ‘a Substack’ than a blog on WordPress is ‘a WordPress.’ It’s the illusion of independence.”
— John Gruber

Who this is for

If you’re a thoughtful person who would like a proper site with your name on it — a place that links out to your social accounts if you still want them, a place to post photos or write about your year abroad or hand out a URL at a dinner party — you shouldn’t be spending a weekend wrestling a template. You should have someone build you something quiet and durable, and then get out of the way.

Everyone who wants a personal site otherwise gets funneled into Squarespace or WordPress and ends up with something slow, surveilled, and rented. A static HTML site on a clean little server of your own, built by someone who knows what he’s doing, is an actual luxury item in 2026 — even though technically it’s the oldest thing on the web.

“If you want to control your content on the web, post it at your own personal domain name. That’s it. Everything else you want to do is icing on the cake.”
— Manton Reece

I can help

This is its own engagement — quoted per project, not folded into anything else I do.

I can build you a classy site or just a landing page — the kind of thing that looks like it was designed for you rather than rolled out of a dropdown.

I can set up email at your domain.

I can show you how to post a blog entry or swap out a photo without touching anything that asks for a password twice a day.

If your presence is scattered across Instagram, Substack, and a Facebook page, I can help you consolidate. Your own page, on your own domain, becomes the canonical thing. The platforms become places you syndicate to, if you want — not places you live.

If you want something shareable, I can print you a QR-coded card on heavy stock — the kind of thing a person hands across a café table — that points straight to your site.

The build is a few days of my time. The upkeep is almost nothing. And you’ll learn something along the way you will never learn from a Squarespace rep. Each project is quoted after we talk; tell me what you’re imagining.

If you’re also working with me on a move to Mexico, the digital piece comes at a friend rate — about half what I’d charge a stranger.

The algorithms don’t know you’ve changed. The conversations are still about whatever was burning in the country you left. There’s a smaller, quieter room available — populated by people you actually want to talk to, on a server in a jurisdiction you choose. You can pick from any number of independent servers (including the small one I run here) or, if you’re inclined, host your own (I can help). That room is in the fediverse.

What is this?

The fediverse is a network of independent social-media servers that talk to one another.

The model that’s easiest to understand is email. Your inbox might live at gmail.com or proton.me or icloud.com or your own domain — different companies, different rules, different addresses. But you can email anyone at any of those companies, because all email servers speak a shared protocol called SMTP. No single company owns email. You don’t have to be on Gmail to email someone on Gmail.

The fediverse is the same idea applied to social media. Different servers, run by different people, in different countries — all talking to one another through an open protocol called ActivityPub. You can follow someone, reply to them, see their photos, regardless of which server they’re on.

The most well-known software in the fediverse is Mastodon, which is what runs on most of these servers. There are several others — including the lighter alternative I run, called GoToSocial — but they all speak the same protocol, so they all interoperate. People talk about “Mastodon” the way they talk about Gmail: it’s the most familiar name, but it’s not the only thing in the room.

How is this different from Twitter or Instagram?

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are platforms. One company owns the servers, the rules, and your account. They can shut you down, change the algorithm, sell ads against your content, or sell the company to someone you wouldn’t trust with your dog. You’re a tenant. And the algorithms that run the place reward rage; over the years the timeline becomes a coliseum full of lions and jackals.

The fediverse is closer to the open web of the early 2000s. There’s no single owner. If a server is run badly, you move to another one and take your followers with you. If a corporation buys one server, the others keep working and you can leave. The infrastructure is shared and open; the choice of who hosts you is yours. On a small, hand-moderated server, the host can actually keep the jackals out.

What does my handle look like?

Like an email address, with an extra @ at the front:

@your-name@your-server.com

Mine is @uncle@yolicali.mx. That’s the address other people use to follow me, mention me, or send me a reply, regardless of which server they’re on themselves.

Why does a Mexico relocation helper have his own server?

Two reasons.

I built yolicali.mx on the principle that you should own your own digital identity — your domain, your email, your data, your social presence. Running my own social server instead of having an account on someone else’s is the same idea applied to the social-media layer. It’s part of how the rest of the site is built. (See the colophon for the full plumbing, and owning your identity for the longer version of the principle.)

It also gives me a small, hand-curated room — La Tertulia, after the Spanish literary tradition of a hosted gathering for conversation — where I can have slow, real exchanges with people in the broader fediverse without renting space from a corporation. Membership is by invitation; the door is small on purpose. If you’d like one, write me at uncle@yolicali.mx with a sentence or two about who you are. I read every note.

How do I choose a server?

Whichever you pick, your account can follow and interact with anyone across the fediverse — server choice is mostly about culture and moderation, not reach.

Three reasonable paths.

The first is to ask me for an invitation to La Tertulia, the small instance I run. Email me at uncle@yolicali.mx with a sentence or two about who you are. The room is hand-curated and the door is small on purpose, but if you found your way here you’re likely the kind of person I’d be glad to host.

The second is to pick a server from the official Mastodon list. It’s a filterable picker — language, region, topic, registration policy — with a short description of each server. Choose one whose vibe fits.

The third is to have your own server at your own domain — your own digital home, run for you. That’s the path I describe on the owning your identity page; I can build it for you.

How do I find people to follow?

Follow whoever you find interesting from any server. The most reliable path is to find one or two people whose work you already like, see who they follow, and walk outward from there. Hashtags also work — search #mexico, #cdmx, or whatever your interests are, and you’ll find people across many servers.

You don’t need to follow many. The fediverse rewards small, attentive feeds.

What app should I use?

The official Mastodon web interface works in any browser. On Apple devices, the app I use and recommend is Ivory for iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh. It’s from Tapbots, the small studio that made Tweetbot — the best Twitter client ever made, back in the day before Twitter jumped the shark. Ivory does the same for the fediverse.

A few common questions

• Do I need an account to read posts? No. Anyone’s public profile is a regular web page. You can read my profile, for example, without an account.
• Can I cross-post from Twitter? Tools exist, but it tends to look like a tourist who never settles. Better to write directly here.
• Is it safe? As safe as any small server run by someone you trust. Different from “as safe as a billion-dollar corporation,” which is a different kind of safe.
• Will the people I know be there? Some, slowly. The fediverse is where people who’ve gotten tired of the platforms tend to land. It’s a smaller, quieter room. That’s the point.