@shellsharks

Within the first week on the Fediverse, which was not so long ago for me, I decided I was going to have my own Instance. I went with Friendica because I like the default interface and I do not like the micro-bloggin concept at all. I was going to do exactly what you did in regards to having a separate blog and post links to my mastodon before I discovered Friendica.

I decided that I would make my Instance available to others emigrating from Meta though so it is not a private Instance. It has been a challenge and I am a very experienced System Admin with decades of experience or I probably would not have gotten it setup so quickly. Because of my aversion to Canonical and my preference for RHEL, I went with Rocky 9, which gave me some other challenges. As Friendica uses Debian based systems by default. Such as having to compile my own php-modules for imagemagick, etc. Which require setting up copr for php to upgrade. Though most of that was pretty simple. Setting up sendmail was a hoot. To satisfy Gmail I had to do some dns record manipulation to setup so-called anti-spamming tools they ask for. There was also plenty to do with getting SELinux to play nice with my Services 😉.

After I jumped a lot of hurdles I then found that the default configuration of Friendica had some glaring flaws and I had to make some changes to get things to run smoothly and PHP-FPM and MariaDB still like to shutdown periodically though I put a band-aid on that by writing a shell script to check whether httpd, fpm-php and mariadb were running, and if not start them. Then added it to the cron to run every 15 minutes.

Since the service check script things have been running pretty smooth. If you decide to go back to VPS please get in touch I will certainly help you out. I can even help you setup sendmail so you do not need a smtp relay.

Though for development purposes I like podman (think docker) I am not a fan of having production servers in containers. My VPS is on IONOS and their pricing is very reasonable. I use only my MariaDB datastore and it is handling things fine. I could probably reduce usage even more if I cut down persistence some on posts on my Instance.

The main Issue with self hosting for many is that propagation tends to suck, unless you already have a huge following such as you have. I had to enable a relay on my instance to help compensate for a lack of users and followers. I would also mention, not that you do not realize this, though someone reading your post and thinking they could setup their own instance to troll and bother people forget it. Your statement:

shellsharks@shellsharks.social wrote:

Deplatforming resistance: Since you are the instance admin, you can not be deplatformed. Only your ISP or hosting provider could effectively do this and this is quite rare.

Is not entirely accurate, ask FOSStodon. If you run a poorly moderated or abusive Instance other Instances will block you. And that will deplatform you. I know you realize this and I am not mentioning this for your benefit but for those that might think that it would be a great idea to propagate their abuse on Fediverse and avoid moderation.

You take care and be sure to let me know if you need help in the event that you ever do decide to self host again on a VPS.

Screenshot of my Instance:

A few days ago I decided to add a primitive logging feature to services so I would know when the services were actually started. At around 8:15pm EST MariaDB was started and at 9:15pm EST PHP-FPM was started. Starting the services when they go down does not fix the problem that causes their failure in the first place. Though it does keep the Instance up and running. One small victory.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Check to be sure all services are active, if not start them
# This shell script is invoked by cron every 15 minutes on this server
# note: The script does nothing if the services are active.

# Added primitive logging by appending to ../log/services.log every
# time that a service needs to be started.
# It is assumed that this script is launched from /var/www/html/bin 
# and services.log is in /var/www/html/log

apache_status=$(systemctl is-active httpd)
mariadb_status=$(systemctl is-active mariadb)
phpfpm_status=$(systemctl is-active php-fpm)

if [ "$mariadb_status" == "failed" ]; then
	systemctl start mariadb
        echo "$(date) Had to start MariaDB!" >> ../log/services.log
fi

if [ "$phpfpm_status" == "failed" ]; then
       systemctl start php-fpm
       echo "$(date) Had to start PHP-FPM!" >> ../log/services.log
fi

if [ "$apache_status" == "failed" ]; then
	systemctl start httpd
        echo "$(date) Had to start Apache!" >> ../log/services.log
fi

unset apache_status
unset mariadb_status
unset phpfpm_status

Updated Laptop Yesterday

Fedora 42 released and I went ahead and updated my laptop. I usually wait for a few months for them to work out the early release cycle bugs. 😉 Though I had been hearing good reviews from early adopters so I went ahead and took the plunge. I have been primarily using Fedora since F19. Canonical was pissing in my Wheaties again and I finally said to hell with them. I had tried Fedora before though I had drifted away looking for greener pastures. There are not a whole lot of General Purpose (GP) GNU/Linux distros that I have not tried at some point in time. Though my main 4 still remain:

• Fedora
• Arch
• LFS (Linux From Scratch)
• Alpine Linux

Of course I use Rocky Linux for my servers if possible though that is not a daily driver. I have been using GNU/Linux since 1993 when I heard about it on the UseNet and decided to download it, compile it and give it a whirl. It was not until 1997 or 1998 when Boot Magazine (now Wired) had Debian on a CD that I got to try out X Server. You see X Server is huge and on dial up that would be a several day adventure downloading so I had just put together a console. Not to say I had no graphics, It just wasn't on X. I have had to keep up with MS/DOS and then Windows because of work and family and friends though I have not had a MS Operating System on a machine of mine, except for testing, since 1993.

Why Fedora? Why Gnome? Well, the short and long of that is that it works for me. You see there is no best distro or DE (Desktop Environment). There is only the distro and DE that is best for you. So if someone is trying to shove their favorite distro down your throat, smile and check out some distros for yourself. Try the different DEs. We are fortunate enough to have many of them to choose from. Some OSes are stuck with, well, no choice.

@🌸 lily 🏳️‍⚧️ θΔ ⋐ & ∞ @φ @win Fedi is full of css. Look in the source to the many interfaces. Now, I can only speak of friendica as that is what I have installed on my server. Though the template files for Smiley3 (the template engine used by friendica) strongly uses css. They are in the themes and schemes to those themes.

Now, yes, you could write an app that accessed the api and never process any css. And not be a webui at all. Though most of what I have seen uses a webview and does use the css that is available for theming. Personally, I do not like any of the apps I have found and use a browser to access my instance. The apps just leave so much out, they are barely functional.

Now the transport layer of course does not use css. Because css is for the view. If you look at the attached screenshot from a terminal instance of my ssh connection to my VPS you will see that there are plenty of css files and more than those be sure. Those are just the basic css files for frio and the others are for the schemes for enhancing frio (a friendica theme).