This week, I finally pulled the plug on my internet life on Twitter and Reddit. Deleted both accounts and I’m moving over to Mastodon and Lemmy full time. And of course, self hosting again (if you can have full control and ownership over your data, why wouldn’t you?).
I started with GoToSocial because it ticked all my boxes:
- Probably single user, unless someone asks to sign up
- Lightweight since it’s Go based
- Actively maintained
Yeah, that lasted about 3 days before I lost the plot because my feed was just… dead. Honestly that’s on me for being pretty new to the fediverse and not knowing who to follow. Instead of figuring that out though, I spent my time customizing the CSS to Gruvbox before even getting the basics working (which, yeah, dumb move lol). Alright, Mastodon it is. Oh and shoutout to defcon.social for hosting me for free before I decided to go self hosted. For Lemmy though, I’ll probably just stay on someone else’s instance. I just like a more Twitter-style platform for posting. On Reddit I was basically just a lurker anyway lol.
So I also have this Nostr relay, originally just for notifications for my hidden service monitoring. But it felt like a waste to not use it for posting too, so I opened up the port and tunneled it to the public. Then a few days later my server just crashed (lmao what the hell). Out of nowhere it got flooded with users, mostly spam from clearnet. Which is wild because I never shared the clearnet link anywhere. My best guess is it got picked up through negentropy or some relay-to-relay propagation. Turns out the strfry plugin I wrote in Go wasn’t actually running and I had no idea (silly me). Probably didn’t matter before since barely anyone was using it back when it was Tor only. Anyway, it’s back to normal now.
Now this next part is something I still haven’t figured out. I want to crosspost to my capsule too, as in Gemini. Browsing there is genuinely fun for me. Like I’m just tired of trying to read something and getting hit with popups, ads, or some JS-heavy site that needs over 1MB just to render a page. Over there I can just focus on the writing. Because of that I actually swapped my notes page to just be a Mastodon widget (and opened it up to clearnet). I was going to convert my old blog posts over there too, but then I realized even my Markdown is kind of bloated (lmao). The real problem though is there’s no free option to make my capsule accessible outside of Tor while still using my own domain (hit me up if you know a way). So for now, Tor only it is.
And because of all three of those things, I ended up building a simple personal app to crosspost to Mastodon, Nostr, and my capsule all at once. It works, kind of. Pretty buggy and I still have a lot to learn about the Nostr protocol.
Oh yeah, this is actually my first real long post on both Nostr and my gemlog.
Well, messy weeks as always.