Thinking about setting up a #gotosocial instance as a possible alternative to my current Mastodon instance. Seems quite straight forward to run as a self-contained single (podman) container, which is an approach I have come to like more and more. I already run my own #Forgejo instance that way. When I have time to spare, I will give it a try :)

Out there, in the worrying world of today is a little #Zilog #Z80 computer with a mere 64KB of #RAM and running the #1970s CP/M operating system.

This little machine is connected to the #intertubes and it's serving a #singleuser #bulletinboardsystem for you, the worrying souls of #yesteryears to visit.

Take a break from today, connect like it's 1985 - here on RC-BOX BBS, the world's first and (currently) only #rc2014 based bulletin board system in the world!

Check out the #alttext or my #profile info for information on how to connect.

#bbs
#rc2014bbs
#rcbox

As a long time #KDE #plasma6 / #kde_plasma user I have to say things just become worse and worse and I blame the #singleuser #development syndrome, where developers think there will always be one singe user logged in to a system at one time on a #multiuser system as #Linux
On my #laptop that I'm the only user Plasma6 works fine, but on a desktop computer which I share, things are completely different , plasmashell keeps on crashing or freezing (the panel becomes just a grey empty entity) and when switching between users, the audio is missing and the whole desktop freezes until plasma finds the audio device and reattached it, which happens like a minute after you have switched.

Another example is ksnip which don't handle multiple users at all, it seems that the first user who starts it will be the one running it, but the second user then can control the first users ksnip session.

The only reasons I still use plasma are the following

- #kwin is the only window manager I have found that allows me to disable all shortcuts for a specific app, this is so valuable when run a virtual machine, as you want all shortcuts to be for that instance than your own host.

- window manager that allows me to have close button on the left side of the title bar and the minimize/maximize on the right side.

- in window dialog the OK come to left of Cancel (yeah more of a #qt thing)

- Uses qt

- dont' use #CSD (this just makes everyone to use their own look for the window title and suddenly you have the messed up look from #microsoft instead of the uniformed look)

I have tried #lxqt but something causes the title bar to kwin to be twice as big as running with the same settings in plasma and it's not as keen on using kwallet where all my passwords are stored.

When I poked around with Postmarks (a federated bookmarking service) last year, I briefly mentioned another federated server, Shuttlecraft… but I never followed up on that.

Shuttlecraft is a single-user ActivityPub-compatible application that can run on a platform like Glitch – in fact, it’s more-or-less a single-click deployment to fork and install on Glitch.

I’ve written about being all-in on the Fediverse and I generally try a lot of different things out. I created a Shuttlecraft instance for myself around the same time I set up Postmarks last year – both run on Glitch, both are somewhat experimental / in-progress and unfinished. The fact is that I use my Postmarks instance all the time for logging links of interest, but Shuttlecraft has really just been sitting there without very much interaction. That’s mostly deliberate, it’s a playground more than anything else, and it can be handy for playing with interactions with other ActivityPub servers.

However – yesterday I thought I’d take a quick look at it, only to discover that my Glitch app was down.

After doing some digging in the console and logs, I found that Node was complaining about being unable to load a module. That was surprising to me, as I hadn’t changed anything there for a long while. It turned out that what was actually happening was that the container’s disk allocation had run out, and the log message itself was spurious.

To be fair, the Shuttlecraft README is very clear that a) it’s an unsupported side-project from the author Ben Brown, and b) …

all data is written as PLAIN TEXT FILES to the disk.

Right now, the app builds an IN-MEMORY INDEX of EVERY SINGLE POST. This will work for several thousand posts, but … maybe not for 10,000s of posts. I’m not sure how far it will go. I have ideas about being able to shard the index into multiple files and page through it, etc. But.

It took a bit of very messy and imperfect cleanup inside hidden directories in the Glitch container, but for now, I have my small instance back up again. Realistically, it is probably not worth following / I don’t look at it much / it will fall over again, before much longer – but it’s also a fun thing to tinker with, and the code is quick to tweak in the Glitch editor.

In the past few months, quite a few things have changed in the ecosystem – for example, I’m now on Threads, and my account is federated out from there. Shuttlecraft is missing something in its ability to play nicely with that, which is a bit sad… maybe I’ll have to have a look into it at some stage.

I’ll have to look at some more Fediverse-compatible apps soon, hopefully more resilient ones! Fediforum is coming up next month, and that’s usually a great place to learn about what developers are working on across the ActivityPub ecosystem.

https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/07/recovering-my-shuttlecraft/

Tip for #singleuser or small instance users:
The biggest disadvantage of small instances is the dead federated timeline. Instance admins can subscribe to the classic #relays, but this comes at a high price such as high resource usage and too much noise, depending on the relay. It's either all or nothing.

Instead you can populate your federated timeline by following the #FediBuzz relays. They can be followed as normal users and boost posts based on the hashtag, instance or even language.
Here are a few examples:
@tag-fediverse (boosts the #fediverse hashtag from all instances)
@instance-jasdemi.com (boosts everything from my instance, jasdemi.com)
@language-it (boosts only posts in Italian language from all instances)

Now before you follow any relays, I suggest creating an alt account as this will make you home timeline very noisy. With your main account you can now check out the federated timeline or follow hashtags.
More info here: https://relay.fedi.buzz/

#fediadmin #gotosocial #sharkey #mastodon #feditip #selfhosted

For #selfhosted #singleuser #mastodonadmin folks:

If you were to start over again fresh in 2025, what would be your preferred #Fediverse alternative stack or project instead of #Mastodon?

Asking for a friend. ( #itme )

5 months into self-hosting my single-user instance, and I have zero complaints. The cost comes up to $6usd/mo. (~$8 cad, atm), and there’s headroom to spare. I’m running Akkoma on Fedora (which I thought was 38 but is actually 37 so I guess I should probably update it).

This is on a Vultr “Cloud Compute” server, with the “AMD High Performance” option (EPYC CPU + NVMe storage) on the lowest tier: 1 vCPU, 1GB memory, and 25GB storage. As an irritable person who hates waiting for things to load, it’s performed beautifully.

I can’t comment on Mastodon. While I’m told it’s a bit of a resource hog, especially as it scales, it might be perfectly fine for a single user instance, although when I was first considering self-hosting, I was advised that I’d be better off spending $15 or $20 minimum on a more capable server for Mastodon. I can’t refute or confirm that statement, so use your own judgement, but I don’t really like the way the Mastodon project is run, and I like being able to use Markdown, even if barely anybody will see it.