Funny thing about that is it was those days that had me find out about runit, which is 100% better in pretty much every way, so systemd wasn't all bad :^)
Half tempted to put plateia.org's server on runit and see how well debian works on it but I actually have some users other than me here now so I best not.
@maiyannah With debian you used to be able to simply* do `apt-get install runit-init` and that replaced sysvinit with an init doing runit.

That package is now gone, and simply taking the old one and installing it on an up-to-date debian doesn't work.

I wonder if devuan has it.

* A lie, obviously, but a lot of the times true. That and first getting dropbear and other things to run under runit (simply** apt-get install dropbear-run klogd-run) is sort of all I had to do to get my VPS to reduce its dead weight by 64-128 MB RAM.

** Slightly less of a lie