tldr: 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. =)