Good morning Fedi friends and happy Saturday! 🌈
File under: I'm such a clown sometimes. I did something extremely foolish yesterday (installation-wise) that bricked my whole YunoHost with Sharkey instance. This is not the fault of YunoHost or Sharkey, it's just me being the biggest airhead.
So this morning I nuked that VPS (Hetzner makes it so easy to start and stop) and, armed with a stopwatch, I wanted to see how long it would take me to order a new server, log in, install YunoHost and set up a main URL and a subdomain to log in.
I had this unique challenge that we're going hiking in the mountains so my time is very limited this morning.
How long did it take me? A grand total of 14 minutes.
The perks of being a fool is that you repeat the steps so many times that you go from being terrified (what do I have to do now?) to just sailing through the steps.
Time went like this:
1m30s: logged onto Hetzner, ordered a new server (Debian v12)
4m50s in: logged in, increased security, ran apt update and apt upgrade
5m in: installed YunoHost (thanks #curl)
7m30s in: with YunoHost successfully installed, I got into their beautiful graphical interface to continue the post install
9m30s in: post installation complete
11m 20s in: began tweaking DNS records for the main domain and the logging in subdomain, installed certificates, etc.
14m23s = all done, tripled checked that everything is working in incognito mode (it is) 🥳
Wishing you all a great day. Time to go hiking for me and my fam 🗻
#MySoCalledSudoLife #selfhosting
mysocalledsudolife
Good morning Fedi friends! 🌈✨
Made it back to France and now I’m at my in laws’.
I forgot a wired keyboard at my parents’ in Italy and I only have a wireless keyboard and mouse with me, which were never paired to my Raspi. Mother-in-law came to my rescue and gave me an old wired mouse… and with #Ubuntu’s accessibility setting and on screen keyboard I was able to log in and connect my gear. Ouf!
Happy #Linux / #Raspi week to me (till I get home to Paris) 🐧
Now I had some powerful epiphanies yesterday, with my rickety Sharkey instance.
Sad to say that because it locked me out, and recovery codes aren’t working either, its fate is now sealed. I lost all trust in it and won’t spend any more precious time on it.
But this ONLY relates to my self-hosted Sharkey, which has been cursed from the start, not the software itself, which is WONDERFUL.
I’ll stop putting my energy on it and carry on with my plan (a quiet corner of the Fediverse) on @ruud’s calckey.world — which worked perfectly for me last year, when I was test driving Sharkey. Time to resurrect the account and set up monthly recurring donations.
Anyway, wishing you all a fantastic day!
🏕️ 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 🌿
🏕️ 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
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 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
In case you were wondering why I'm moving #MySoCalledSudoLife posts to my federated Wordpress blog, well, here is why.
Tags, categories and search.
See it in action:
🔗: https://elenarossini.com/category/my-so-called-sudo-life/
#POSSE
🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting: day 230 (disconnected edition) 🏝️
a micro blog post that celebrates the release of #Ghost v6 - and laments the fact I can’t upgrade to it at the moment (stranded in a remote place with spotty internet).
HUGE congratulations to @index @johnonolan and the whole Ghost team 🥳
I’m starting a countdown and hope I can type “ghost update” in Terminal in 12-13 days or so.
#MySoCalledSudoLife #MySoCalledSudoLifeInterrupted #selfhosted #ActivityPub
🏕️ my adventures in self-hosting: day 218 (trimming edition) ✂️
A new blog post where I reveal how many Fediverse accounts I have (spoiler alert: too many) and discuss plans to self-host a new one 🤭
🔗: https://news.elenarossini.com/my-so-called-sudo-life/my-adventures-in-self-hosting-day-218-trimming-edition/
#MySoCalledSudoLife
🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 198 (summer project edition) 🏖️
Hello Fedi friends,
I hope you've been having a nice week so far.
I've been in childcare mode, thus the silence. I've been thinking about something and I would love to get your advice.
#AskFedi: is there a way to export one's #GoToSocial archive of posts (but not replies to other users)? Like something with command lines that doesn't require tedious copy and paste operations?
I wanted to gather up all the posts about the first 6 months of my self-hosting journey, to neatly organize them on my website (either in multiple blog posts or pages) so that they could be more easily searchable. It's not really ideal to go on an infinite scroll quest in reverse chronological order to see the evolution of my self-hosting journey.
Like, I'm curious to see what I was up to in January but going back in time loading old posts takes forever. And I cannot really search for keywords.
I'd like to keep things organized and easily searchable. And implement a POSSE system going forward... publishing on my site first and then syndicating elsewhere.
It's my summer of POSSE inspired by @molly0xfff 🤗
https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/
If you have any ideas about how I can easily export all my #GtS posts, I'm all ears.
If not, I suppose I will start copying and pasting everything and do monthly installments of my self-hosting journey (aka "month 1" etc.). After all I have 1125 posts (sigh).
Anyways, I hope this finds you well and that you're keeping cool in this scorching heat (especially fellow Europeans).
have a lovely morning/afternoon/evening wherever you are ❤️
#MySoCalledSudoLife