thanks to tobi from #gotosocial I can finally see profile pictures for a lot of users on my feed... i'm so happy! It was my fault they broke in the first place
(I know you scan that hashtag sometimes so thanks again!!)
For those, like me, who want their own space here and prefer self-hosting, I suggest considering snac2. I'm having a great experience with it, and it's easy to install and configure.
Running the latest GoToSocial instance in rootless podman for a few days now.
So far, I am mostly pleased. There is a lot missing features (it's still alpha, after all), there was one hiccup even - for an hour, it was not syncing anything from fedi and I still didn't find any reason why, had to restart it - let's see if it happens again), but it's really lighweight, updates are quick and easy (I help to manage a mastodon instance and update process is hellish in comparison) and the community around it is also working very fast to get it to beta. Definitely worth supporting.
It doesn't matter if you are new to the #fediverse or if you have been here forever, it's always good to keep in mind that (a) what server you pick, and (b) what software that server runs, matter.
I should admit am fairly new at this. I created my first fediverse account only a year ago. It was a #mastodon server with about 8,000 users. And while it "worked" there was something missing from the experience.
While researching the idea of hosting my own server, I discovered #FireFish which in turn led to discovering #IceShrimp. It's hard to describe how much better the experience is with IceShrimp.
The #UI is just so much better, and the feature set way more robust. The way it handles replies, the ability to quote, to use multiple emojis, etc.
If you have friends or family thinking about joining the Fediverse or are feeling unimpressed with your mastodon experience, I highly recommend getting an account running IceShrimp or other similar software.
Probably also worth mentioning that I also looked at using a #Wordpress integration and #Hubzilla#GoToSocial#Pleroma#Humhub and #Streams. I found them to be clunky; reminding me of how email was in the early 90s.
If the fediverse is going to thrive, then it needs to make a good first impression. Moving beyond mastodon is a good step in the right direction.
0.13.1 Spiderier Sloth fixes a couple small issues with poll vote counts and poll expiry, and an issue where domain blocks were sometimes not being properly enforced when deeper- and higher-level domain blocks were used in combination (eg., when combining blocks for say example.org, bad.example.org, also-bad.example.org).
There are no database migrations or config file changes on this one, so upgrading from 0.13.0 should be very simple :)
Well, that might be it for my #GoToSocial server @bitslag ... highlights the importance of not putting trust in free subdomains haha oh well it was just a test anyway, but yeah I wish the fediverse supported changing domains better and was less reliant on domains and usernames to begin with ... somehow ... maybe with an onion routing type system or something. I dunno! Anyway. That might be it for now for GoToSocial. Farewell!
I kept my #GoToSocial server going for about four months. I just killed it. It was in the Oracle Cloud, and the upgrade of #AlmaLinux from 9.2 to 9.3 was taking a long time. I thought it was hanging, and I hit ctrl-c. That stopped a "scriptlet." I reran the upgrade, which said it completed. I should have know then to remove the new kernel. I rebooted, and that was it.
I hadn't yet set up backups for this server because I considered it experimental.
I was able to pause GRUB with Oracle Cloud's serial console and boot into an old kernel.
Barbaric as hell. That's my review. I removed the latest kernel and then upgraded it. I'm not sure it will work, so I'm not rebooting for now. I'll wait for a new kernel, upgrade that and THEN reboot.
So for now my #GoToSocial server is back among the living.
Time to figure out a backup plan. I've already started. In my mind, that is.
"This document is dedicated to all citizens of planet Earth. You deserve freedom of communication; we hope we have contributed in some part, however small, towards that goal and right."
Being part of the fediverse is great, but running mastodon for a single user instance is not the best fit in terms of maintenance and required resources.
So I'm happy to share that I succesfully deployed both gotosocial and snac2 on openbsd. Both are tiny, lighweight ActivityPub servers that I wll try out the coming weeks/months.
I'm kind of thinking to scribble about my experience of #GoToSocial but it is not flashy like #Misskey forks :blobfoxcomfysleepy: It is still alpha stage and I use every single feature of social media software :blobfoxcomfycofe: Somehow I am comfy and snuggly and blend in very well in #Fediverse :blobfoxpeekcomfy:
I moved to #firefish because it looks very nice and has a bunch of exclusive features, but it has been so unstable that I might move my personal account somehwere else
I know I know I know, I'm on holiday, but I really wanted to finish the big HTML + CSS refactor. So I tidied it up and I think it's almost ready to go:
Previously: the code smell of our HTML was absolutely honking, because when we wrote all that template code we didn't really know yet how to get the most out of Go HTML templating. If you did "view source" on a #GoToSocial page, the indexing and formatting was all over the damn place, HTML soup!
Now: I'm not saying I've become an expert, but I think I've improved things somewhat. No more HTML soup! You can "view source" now and it produces readable HTML. I tried to introduce more semantically meaningful HTML elements in there as well, and use aria-labels a bit more diligently to make thread viewing easier.
If you wanna try it out, here's some links to pages on an instance running with the patch. I recommend doing "view source" or "inspect accessibility properties" on them:
We will never accept an invitation to speak to Meta. We are not interested in speaking to Meta. We're not even on Meta's radar, but if they do for some godforsaken reason reach out to us, we will promptly tell Meta (more or less) to fuck off. That's the #GoToSocial promise, baby! Death to capitalism!