So, I'm on a Mastodon host with my own domain, how did that happen?

[apz@some.apz.fi]

So, I'm on a Mastodon host with my own domain, how did that happen? This will be bit of a long one but bear with me.

My first self-hosting foray into Fediverse wasn't Mastodon but Peertube. It was prompted by Google deciding that I have broken an unspecified TOS point and I realised just how whimsical the ban hammer can be.

My every #selfhosting service has a story, but they all have some kind of a "Oh FFS!" reaction to a provider I'm using and funnily enough Mastodon follows the pattern.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

As a background, people often ask me when I went from Windows to Linux. I never did. I went from DOS to Linux so I was pretty much up to speed by the time in 2000 I started my first company, that was a small ISP. Finland had the same dot com-like boom in the early 2000, where a bigger fish ate the smaller one and then even bigger one ate that when it comes to ISPs, which left us basically with some giants, such as Elisa.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

I've been eyeballing Mastodon hosting for a while now. I have an account on another server and it has done its job, but that instance's topic is gaming and I have stuff to say about a wider variety of topics so I decided to start more IT-related account and host that myself.

Those who know my apzpins account, I'll be bringing that over here once I'm convinced this instance is stable and I've stabbed it to my liking.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

I need to do a bit of theming and get rid of the 500 character limit that the Mastodon team seems to love so much that about bazillion forks that add features all work around that aswell.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

Setting up the Mastodon instance was bit of an ass thing when it comes to documentation. There's official images for Docker, but no documentation about it. Seeing how many hand-holding guides to install Mastodon on Docker there were floating around, I instantly guessed this has to be yet another "Docker is inconvenient for us" case from the developers and sure enough it was.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

I'm way older than Docker and I still have very fresh memories of the era where "modern" web based services cause a huge depency hell on the server, especially when the authors slowly start to require stuff that's not in the distribution, then very specific versions of that. I'm looking at you, Seafile.

From purely administrative point of view, I keep stuff dockerised so the developers can satisfy their own perversions with whatever language-library combinations they want.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

In the end, Peertube and Mastodon seem to co-exist nicely with Nginx installed natively in the host-OS taking care of pointing the visitors into the right containers. I've yet to dig deeper on things to tweak and this thing needs a lot more connections before it'll reach the levels how well the previous Mastodon host was federated, but for now I'm relying on couple of relays.

[apz@some.apz.fi]

So, new Mastodon, who dis?

[ikket@mementomori.social]

@apz there was someone building containers based on #birdUI. It's very good theme.