73 HB9ERY QSL

mastodon project to gotosocial

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 Z

I have tried several times to self-host the official opensource project mastodon. I’m much more minimalist-minded, such as supporting project like Gemini, as I’m from unix-shells world. I prefer focusing on contents rather than on cosmetics, like the bloated web pages of today.

Gemini is a minimalist protocol, meant to avoid how bloated weird HTTP went. Minimalism permits fast loading, no diverting cosmetics, so small attack surface, removes pressure on server resources. I prefer to focus on contents, like in a book, still layout setup with markdown, but no weird unsafe javascript. TLS is mandatory. By design there are no places for long extensions options. Minimalism rule prevails. So no goal to extend…extend…extend.. and…wait…we’re back to bloated HTTP..oh nooo!

Mastodon is an awesome platform but maintaining the official server is quit time eating. After several versions upgrades conflicts nightmare with ruby and other frameworks included, I gave up, as what was meant to be lightweight server management, easily falls into hours of issues solving, which is really not what I planned for. I really don’t blame the project at all. It is a wonderful project, but it is rather heavyweight with all the components for the timeslots I can reserve relating to mastodon server management.

Then I found gotosocial and it seems to really meet my needs and the design principles I adhere with. gotosocial is written in Go, one of my favourite programming languages, this is a welcome sign. The project seems to be very focus with privacy, user respect, simple straightforward options. Again, that kind of minimalism is a sign of good design for me.

No external dependencies apart from a database (or just use SQLite!).: wow…sounds like the developers share same ideas as me. Simple, lightweight, safe, are critical concepts for a fediverse instance. It has minimal resource footprint, so a good candidate to host on a raspberrypi4 for instance.

In terms of security, they seem to be quite clever for visibility of posts. Builtin support for let’s encrypt, 2FA integration, can use sqlite3.

So far So good, while still considered beta release, I plan to setup my own gotosocial instance soon. I’ll let you know.

73 Julien

I stopped my self hosted mastodon server

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 Z

I always have been driven by knowledge sharing (open source, open hardware, open science, sci hub) and minimalism. I specially enjoy embedded systems, microcontrollers, ne555 and opamps.

My computer world is fully in the unix world: keep it as simple as possible. Build small things that do it very good and provide interfaces, APIs.

I am a pure evangelist of command line interface, against all those complex ui. i am convinced that cli encourages us to formulate and structure our goals towards machine usage.

I really disagree with interfaces such as ai assistant. This tends to interrupt thinking constructions. I can ask for information but I need to formulate my question correctly, this helps me to confirm that I understand what I look for. Otherwise think again before asking and come back.

Asking good questions means we understand the context, the issue. If we can ask approximate questions, ai assistant will guide us to answers, but my critical issue remains that I do not understand at first.

Sure I can delegate mass data analysis to computers, but that’s really different else as relying for an assistant for any kind of approximate half-built request.

So i’m a much bigger fan of ncurses-like applications than heavy ajax|qt|electron ui frameworks. minimalism permits to focus on what is required and forget about diverting cosmetics (LaTeX vs ms word).

I’m a big supporter of projects such as Gemini against bloated web of 2024.

Having said that, let me come back to mastodon. ) I nerver was interested into using proprietary service such as Facebook or Twitter. So when mastodon arises, I was happy and curious.

ActivityPub is a wonderful protocol for integrations, interoperability. We need such powerful protocols to become very popular and common.

However, while discovering mastodon, I became more and more deceived. Sure it free and opensource software. Sure it is a federated project.

But looks like they re-created bloated heavyweight applications that usually happen in the proprietary world of editors.

I had numerous issues for security updates, puma versions conflicts, ruby, etc… All this to exchange text messages with cat pictures?? …something is wrong here…

I stopped my self-hosted server.

I prefer to build pubs or rooms for secure scuttlebutt social network. It brings interesting different semantics else as usual social network (commercial) service.

I also particpate and encourage mesh radio networks such as meshtastic and nomadnet/reticulum.

mablab mastodon upgrade fail

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

The recent AUR upgrade failed. I will fix it during the week.

Thank you.

mablab mastodon instance is back again

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 Z

Finally, moved to a Archlinux server instance, server is back online.

mablab mastodon instance is broken due to Debian 12 upgrade

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 Z

The instance is currently out of service due to Ruby versions conflicts AFAIU. Will work on this during next weekend.

mablab mastodon instance is alive and under preparation

jma@mbuf.net (jma) — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:00:00 Z

I have started my own instance of mastodon…finally. I prepare this server to be a small size community (less than 100 users probably).

I need to prepare the policies, chart, etc… However I want to keep the numbers of users rather small because I don’t plan to grow much and prefer to focus on small groups of people, federating with others. Also, for moderation, I won’t have a lot of time to deal with, so clear rules and clear blocking when abuse occurs.

Stay tuned, more to come soon, Xmas is coming ;-)

mablab instance ..not yet public for signup..