🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 177 (VPS stress test edition) 📈
Dear Fedi friends,
You might have noticed I've been a little quiet on here since launching my Fedi promo video. What happened?
Well well well, the unexpected victim of my viral toot / video was... my beloved #GoToSocial account.
Approximately 12 hours after posting about my video - a toot that got 1200+ boosts - for some reason federation broke on this account. I was still posting messages and replying but getting zero interactions.
So yesterday evening, thanks to the amazing help of people on the GoToSocial Matrix help room, I was told to upgrade to the latest version of GoToSocial. And that fixed the problem, yay.
If you don't mind, I'll copy and paste parts of 2 messages I had tried to publish Tue & Wed:
((( message from Tue evening )))
Thank you for all the amazing feedback you shared today re: my Fediverse promo video. I’m really touched.
Extra thanks to everyone who helped spread the word on Big Tech platforms - to reach a wider audience. I don’t have any accounts there anymore (not even on LinkedIn) so I appreciate your help with fediverse advocacy 🙏
And special special thanks to all the superheroes who intentionally left the browser tab open on my video to take advantage of PeerTube’s P2P feature, helping offload bandwidth strain from my little server. You rock! 🥹
((( beginning of message from Wed Jun 11 )))
The past 24 hours have been incredible! Thank you for all the boosts to the post about my Fedi promo video (over a thousand!)
It looks like my self-hosted Ghost blog did well with the massive wave of traffic and didn't experience the "Mastodon hug of Death." THANK YOU Varnish cache for it! Total game changer. I could not recommend it more! (As someone who experienced the Mastodon hug of death TWICE before installing Varnish cache) 😅
So: my #Ghost blog survived. Ditto for my self-hosted #PeerTube (which is on a separate VPS - installed/managed via #YunoHost). The video so far has almost 5000 views - which is pretty good for PeerTube.
✨ The magic of the fediverse for you ✨
((( end of pasted messages )))
Since yesterday, I changed the visibility of the video, making it public. And my VPS is surviving, thanks to PeerTube's P2P and various instances mirroring the video (thank you fellow admins, I owe you big time!)
I'm just so grateful for all your nice words and support.
Later today I'll travel to Amsterdam, as I will be speaking at #PubConf2025 about the Fediverse YAY. I'm super honored for this opportunity and I look forward to reconnecting with many other Fediverse advocates who have become friends.
Exciting times 🥹
Wishing you all a lovely day! ✨🚀
#MySoCalledSudoLife #TheFutureIsFederated
mysocalledsudolife
🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 76 ✨
Monday morning, which means: backing up my #YunoHost setup.
I see that #GoToSocial has an update available but I'm too scared to upgrade it. Having my 4th cup of espresso and working up the courage to do it (I hear it takes a looong time). Hoping I don't break anything 😅
In other news, I am LOVING my #LinkStack and having a glimpse into the links that are the most popular (LinkStack offers you a ranking in reverse order of the most clicked links when you log into their dashboard). Is anyone interested in me writing about it? For reference, here is what the front end looks like: https://elena.social
Off I go update my #GoToSocial, wish me luck!
#MySoCalledSudoLife #FOSS
🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 94 ✨
Self-hosted Ghost site unveiling - take 2 🎬
I'm finally ready to show you my self-hosted #Ghost site: installed on my own, with command lines, with a lot of patience and after many attempts (including 4 VPS wipes).
It took me a while to migrate all the posts, media and members, but here we go, finally:
✨ https://news.elenarossini.com ✨
Thanks to your wonderful advice and help (especially by @shollyethan) I got the courage to edit my nginx config and I'm waiting to see if the redirects from the old posts work. It's always DNS... and nginx 😂
And this is take 2 because I swear this self-hosted Ghost site is slightly cursed and the first time around as soon as I edited the URL of an old Mastodon toot, the site went offline. This happened twice today. Won't touch any URLs and will metaphorically sage the VPS to clear its energy 'cause it's a little cursed 🌿
Good morning Fedi friends!
It's been 99 days since I started self-hosting my own Fediverse instances. Crazy how time flies!
I've been a bit absent from here this week because I started exploring the world of #PeerTube from the POV of a creator.
I just set up my own account on #MakerTube - so that I can write a guide that is accessible to many (as opposed to skipping this step and going straight to self-hosting).
Anyway, here is my PeerTube account: https://makertube.net/a/elena/video-channels
I have been able to follow it from #Mastodon and #Friendica without a problem, but I keep getting an error message when I try to subscribe with my #GoToSocial username. The exact message: "Cannot fetch information from this remote account." Does anybody have the same issue? (as in: people on GoToSocial, can you subscribe to PeerTube channels?)
Wishing you all a lovely day 🌞
P.S.: about to go offline for the rest of the day because... there's no pre-school in France on Wednesdays and the garderie keeps my little one up until 12:30. So apologies in advance if I'm slow to reply to messages.
#MySoCalledSudoLife
Hello Fedi friends! This is a routine reminder that I've just migrated my Ghost blog to a self-hosted instance.
If you follow #TheFutureIsFederated via RSS, please update the feed's URL:
https://news.elenarossini.com/rss/
And if you had bookmarked any of my old posts, they'll still work if you refresh the page... or else just swap "blog" with "news" in the address bar.
This is my proudest moment in #MySoCalledSudoLife as I installed everything with commands. I've learned so much these past 4 months!
🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 111 (quiet edition) 💤
Good morning Fedi friends!
I hope you had a nice weekend.
After backing up my two VPSs I am now staring at my #YunoHost dashboard thinking: now what?
It feels a little odd not to have to tackle any pressing self-hosting issues. Everything seems to be working well, including my manual installation of Ghost on a second (Ubuntu) VPS.
I'm now in maintenance mode.
I must confess in the past 24 hours I have spent some time browsing @yunohost 's app catalogue. So many fascinating things in there! But I am exercising restraint (for now, LOL!)
I'm very grateful for all the software I'm currently self-hosting.
On Debian (via YunoHost):
#Fail2Ban
#Friendica -> https://elenarossini.fr/profile/ele/
#GoToSocial (this account!)
#LinkStack -> https://elena.social
#Pixelfed -> https://photos.elenarossini.com/ele
On Ubuntu:
Fail2Ban
My #Ghost blog/newsletter -> https://news.elenarossini.com
#Varnish cache
I'm highly aware of my privilege and how lucky I am to be doing all this. But can I confess I'm a little bored? Thankfully I may have another big project on the horizon: upgrading my VPS and installing / self-hosting #PeerTube. But that will be for another week. Resting now and enjoying this sense of empowerment / digital sovereignty. Very grateful to be in this position.
Wishing you all a fantastic week!