What's New

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Tue 13 Dec 2022 02:54:26 PM +05

It has been ages since I posted to my gemlog, and unfortunately I also have been much distracted from working on my gemcast as well, to the point where I think that I might as well write something for people who are still reading my Gemini capsule. (Hey, someone is bound to see this.)

A few basic housekeeping things have taken place. For a time I tried switching back to my previous e-mail address, and then after having done so came back to benk@tilde.team. I'm quite happy to use it, and am not any closer to getting e-mail working perfectly on my server. Technically my e-mail address on my server does work, but it's basically using FreeBSD's default settings, which I haven't touched. It means I can only do e-mail on the command line from a remote shell and not IMAP like I want. This is something I hope to get working one day in the future.

My latest adventure was with trying to run Pleroma on my server. It worked at first, and then it stopped working. The I/O was just too much for my disk, which is a very slow emmc, so I made the hard decision to scrap it even though it was working so well in the beginning. I then switched to GoToSocial, which worked so impressively well that I decided to dedicate my domain to it, which means my Fediverse/ActivityPub address is now (and possibly forever) @ben@kwiecien.us

I appreciate everyone who follows me, most of them coming from the Gemini community. I found that, along with XMPP, ActivityPub is something adjacent to Gemini, so we have a lot of users in common. GoToSocial is so amazing, that I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to try.

My domain used to host a Gemini to HTTP proxy called Kineto. I don't now really how much it was being used, but I decided to shut it down at least temporarily to make room for GTS. The proxy can go on its own subdomain, but I'm feeling too lazy to set it up now especially when I may not need it. Kineto is really nice, but Gemini is best served over Gemini, in any case.

Some will remember that I had for a time used twtxt over Gemini, but as it has been implemented so far, it is not really a good fit for Gemini. I had ideas for improvement, but it would involve chaning the twtxt format/spec. When I looked at my logs, I saw that my twtxt file was getting downloaded an obscene number of times a day, so I simply deleted it since I wasn't even using it anymore. I think twtxt is a great idea, but somehow ActivityPub (also not the best protocol) has won the day. Not only is it becoming much more popular, but with an implementation like GoToSocial, there can be a more democratizing effect where people like me who are simply hobbyists hosting their own services on low-end hardware can fully participate in an FOSS, Internet-wide social network without needing the resources required to run Mastodon. (Whether hardware resources, or simply time/energy/expertise.) Both it and XMPP have been major victories in my self-hosting. (Not to mention Gemini.)

Over these weeks I've also learned a bit better how to configure nginx, which made hosting these web-based services more accessible to me. I may try more services in the future, but not too many. I'd rather keep my server running fast and smooth than overburden it, and I feel that somehow I've gotten close to that sweet spot already.

In any case, that's about it on the technical side of things. I had more topics for discussion noted that I will hopefully address in my gemcast in the near future.