As some of you may have noticed, i have changed some things on the fediverse, namely where i am tooting from. If the term fediverse sounds foreign to you, i can recommend the following explainer from the Verge

From 2022 onwards, i had been tooting around on the fediverse from tech.lgbt.

After a series of events and the looming threat of defederation from a few of the fedi instances hosting some of the entities i like to interact with, i decided to start self-hosting my own fedi instance.

i had already spent some time self-hosting some services for some friends off of a VPS provider called Scaleway, but the machine was very underwhelming with a limited 2 cores and 8 GB of RAM.

At that point in time i already had a larger server at home running proxmox, and on which several VM's exist hosting some services I regularly made use of. i however did not want to make use of said home infrastructure to host a fedi instance due to reliability concerns (as i was also in the process of moving).

On the night before FOSDEM - which i won't delve into on this blog - i had the extremely sensible idea to setup a fedi instance whilst procrastinating going to bed.

For this, i had to decide what type of fediverse software i wanted to use. Several options felt practical, namely GoToSocial and Sharkey. i ended up opting for Sharkey over GTS because of the availability and friendliness of the interface.

i also at the same time needed to add more infrastructure to at least have a node which i could consider as "reliable". Despite the general issues with Hetzner ( link to one iteration), i decided to opt for a server hosted there as the cost vs. the provided service still largely outperforms other services (although the onus of managing those systems is on then on me).

i later started a photography instance using Pixelfed, an allegedly federated "Instagram"-like allegedly open-source piece of questionably secure software by a "somewhat" problematic individual on the fediverse ( link to the open-letter).

After several iterations of a failed upgrade completely nuking my database and accounts and federation, i made the wise decision of bailing out and decided to migrate my photography instance to GoToSocial, which has much comfier vibes and has not shown any form of instability so far. It is now available here: pixels.catgirl.global

This started my adventures in hosting additional services in time, such as an uptime monitoring tool ( uptimekuma), various personal services, and additional services i make available to my friends in a limited capacity, such as hosting ontime ( project page) - an event rundown tracking software - for conferences, or hosting uptime monitoring for some others.