Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

After 10+ years of making websites, you'd think I already know CSS. But I just signed up for Josh W. Comeau's #CSSforJS course and I'm sure I will learn a lot!

You should check it out, and you can follow my experience taking the course in my website: https://noeldemartin.com/tasks/learning-css

I never thought I'd say this, but I just learned about a Mastodon feature reading a Seth Godin blog post. Good times :D.

(I learned about the /explore page, no idea it existed)

I also seems like he's going to do something with Mastodon, which is great.

https://seths.blog/2022/11/some-thoughts-on-mastodon/

@martijn @aral I also have a similar situation. I've been running my instance-of-one and I haven't had any performance issues. But of course, I know that's because I don't have that many connections.

So when I read @aral's post I found it very interesting, and I wonder if he's got any thoughts on pleroma or other projects. After all, that's one of the nice things about the fediverse. Different use-cases can leverage different implementations instead of having a one-size-fits-all solution.

@martijn @aral Came here to ask the same thing :)

Now that hopefully the load has decreased 🤞, can you share your thoughts on pleroma? I've also heard the performance is better for instances-of-one.

@marqle Yes, it is compatible because it uses the ActivityPub protocol under the hood, which is what makes Mastodon's federation work :).

There are also many other projects compatible with Mastodon: Pixelfed, Misskey, etc. All these applications are referred to as "the fediverse", so you can search for that if you're interested in learning more.

Personally I've only had experience with Mastodon, though.

If you're still worried about scalability, I've heard that pleroma.social scales even better for instances-of-one.

In any case, I hope this was useful to someone, and see you in the fediverse!

The only thing I've had to do on a regular basis is running the following command: `tootctl media remove`. And it's so rarely that I haven't even bothered scheduling it (even renewing SSL certificates is more annoying).

I also migrated servers once, whilst keeping the same domain. And it was also easier than expected: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/100788065871626613

I guess that's because I don't have that many following/followers (117/781). But that's probably most people's situation anyways.

I know, I know. Not everyone is going to host their own instance. But for someone who has some tech skills and is already hosting something like their personal website, this could be easier than they expect.

I've been running all my websites on a 10$ Digital Ocean droplet and it's been mostly hands-off.

There's been some talk about Mastodon admins having scalability issues with the influx of new users the last couple of weeks. So I thought I'd share my experience running an instance-of-one for 4+ years.

When I started in 2018, I wanted to see how much of a headache it would be to maintain... And I'm happy to say it hasn't been a headache at all! Honestly, I'm surprised it's been so easy. Even with the recent increase in activity, I haven't noticed a hitch (hopefully I won't jinx it now xD).

@antfu Nice to see you join the fediverse :D.

There are already many alternative apps for both Mastodon and the fediverse, so it's likely that one is already written using Vue (not sure about Vite, though).

Doing a quick search I found this one, although it's archived https://github.com/valerauko/vuetodon

Well, I know it's still 4 months away but I just made my reservations to attend #FOSDEM 2023! I went back in 2019 and 2020 and it was great, so I'm looking forward to attending in person again :).

Let me know if you're around! https://fosdem.org

@elgg MoodleNet hasn't supported ActivityPub for over a year now, it should be removed from that list (or at the very least, have the 👻 icon).

Do you know who's the maintainer of that list?

@dajb @jamesravey @thoughtshrapnel I see, that's very weird indeed :/ I didn't notice it was working with curl, I thought it was outdated everywhere.

What I can say is that it must be some cache in the server side, because even clearing the cache completely or using a different browser altogether I still get the outdated version. But using curl I do get the new one.

Maybe it has something to do with that plugin? No idea.

@nolan Just the other day I tried to give this serverless thing a try, but I was discouraged to see that none of the solutions I found have a way to limit spending (DigitalOcean Functions, AWS Lambda, Netlify Functions, etc.).

Although I have to wonder, I suppose all of this can be configured through APIs, right? So why hasn't anybody build a 3rd party service/script to listen to these alerts and shut down the services automatically after crossing a certain threshold?

@nolan Also, tangentially related to this, I am a very big fan of using "conceptual compression" to deal with complexity :). It's somewhat of a cheat because it does create complexity, but it's encapsulated within simple concepts which is nice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKyv-IGvgGE&t=1047s

@nolan Something to mention is that nobody creates complexity for complexity's sake (although I agree with the "we love our own complexity" part). The thing is that we have problems to solve, and most of the time the "easy solution" (ironically) is adding complexity. To actually make something simple takes more time, not less. That's why complexity tends to grow over time. Even if essential complexity does grow with the scope of a project, I'd argue most is accidental complexity.

@weareopencoop @epilepticrabbit @dajbelshaw But at the same time, I do understand why most people don't want to self-host. Personally I think the problem is actually how software is architected, with data being coupled to apps. If something like Solid or other zero data protocols were more widespread, it would be a lot easier to use software that is aligned with our ideals.

PS: I think Doug's microphone is fine, but I've been looking into buying one recently so I'll be sure to avoid that one xD

@weareopencoop @epilepticrabbit @dajbelshaw I think there are a couple of reasons why it's been easy so far. The first one is that I'm the only one using these services, so I don't have to cater to anyone else's needs. And the second is that I rarely install updates, which I am aware is a security risk but to be honest I'm not too worried. I think software can be a lot more stable than people think.

@weareopencoop @epilepticrabbit @dajbelshaw I've been "self-hosting" (on DigitalOcean) a couple of sites and services for a few years and I have to say, as much as I dreaded the prospect of maintaining servers it's been pretty easy so far. I self-host my personal website, this Mastodon instance, and my personal Solid POD (Solid is a protocol for data storage).

Yesterday I reached 2000 movies in my Media Kraken collection, and I've watched 1208. It will probably continue growing at a quicker rate than I watch them, but I love having my own list. I never have to wonder what to watch next when I'm in the mood for a movie :D.