Moving from @sachac@emacs.ch to @sacha@social.sachachua.com
| geektldr: I'm now at @sacha@social.sachachua.com .
Since the emacs.ch Mastodon instance is winding down, I decided to follow @technomancy's recommendation of GoToSocial as a Mastodon-compatibly lightweight ActivityPub surver. I set it up as a Docker container because I still don't trust myself when it comes to security, and I put it behind an Nginx reverse proxy because I already have my web server on port 443.
The issues I ran across were mostly user error.
Instead of copying my Nginx config from one of my
other subsites, I should probably have just
started with the sample Nginx configuration from
the documentation. Eventually I figured out that I
needed the Host line and I didn't need the
location /.well-known/ thing from my other
config. I did add add_header
'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*'; to allow
cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), though, so
that I could use semaphore.social as needed.
I also used:
docker network list docker network inspect gotosocial_gotosocial
to find the IP addresses I needed for my config.yaml:
log-level: "error" host: "social.sachachua.com" landing-page-user: "sacha" letsencrypt-enabled: false port: 8080 bind-address: "172.22.0.2" trusted-proxies: - "127.0.0.1/32" - "172.22.0.1" - "172.22.0.2"
I don't have a lot of space left on my Linode
virtual private server, so I set up GoToSocial in
a 10 GB block storage volume (of which it is now
using 2.5GB). I have backups enabled, but the
automatic backups don't cover block storage. I
think I can work around that with a crontab
entry that copies the sqlite* files from
gotosocial/data into a backup directory in a
regular partition.
I like using mastodon.el to go through the #emacs hashtag to find interesting posts and conversations for Emacs News. Since I have a single-user instance, I might not find as many #emacs posts on my own server compared to emacs.ch or mastodon.social #emacs. GoToSocial doesn't support relays yet. Until I feel reasonably confident that I'm catching a pretty good selection of #emacs posts from the people I follow and the instances I federate with, I might also check against those other timelines.
I think I've gotten @sacha@sachachua.com
pointing to @sacha@social.sachachua.com, so if
you'd like to follow me on Mastodon or another
ActivityPub-compatible service, you can add either
ID. I usually toot links to my Emacs News posts.
I'd like to do a little more microblogging to
share what I'm learning and figuring out, since I
notice my blog posts tend to get sidetracked by
yak-shaving. =)
