I kept my #GoToSocial server going for about four months. I just killed it. It was in the Oracle Cloud, and the upgrade of #AlmaLinux from 9.2 to 9.3 was taking a long time. I thought it was hanging, and I hit ctrl-c. That stopped a "scriptlet." I reran the upgrade, which said it completed. I should have know then to remove the new kernel. I rebooted, and that was it.
I hadn't yet set up backups for this server because I considered it experimental.
I was able to pause GRUB with Oracle Cloud's serial console and boot into an old kernel.
Barbaric as hell. That's my review. I removed the latest kernel and then upgraded it. I'm not sure it will work, so I'm not rebooting for now. I'll wait for a new kernel, upgrade that and THEN reboot.
So for now my #GoToSocial server is back among the living.
Time to figure out a backup plan. I've already started. In my mind, that is.
"This document is dedicated to all citizens of planet Earth. You deserve freedom of communication; we hope we have contributed in some part, however small, towards that goal and right."
Being part of the fediverse is great, but running mastodon for a single user instance is not the best fit in terms of maintenance and required resources.
So I'm happy to share that I succesfully deployed both gotosocial and snac2 on openbsd. Both are tiny, lighweight ActivityPub servers that I wll try out the coming weeks/months.
I'm kind of thinking to scribble about my experience of #GoToSocial but it is not flashy like #Misskey forks :blobfoxcomfysleepy: It is still alpha stage and I use every single feature of social media software :blobfoxcomfycofe: Somehow I am comfy and snuggly and blend in very well in #Fediverse :blobfoxpeekcomfy:
I moved to #firefish because it looks very nice and has a bunch of exclusive features, but it has been so unstable that I might move my personal account somehwere else
I know I know I know, I'm on holiday, but I really wanted to finish the big HTML + CSS refactor. So I tidied it up and I think it's almost ready to go:
Previously: the code smell of our HTML was absolutely honking, because when we wrote all that template code we didn't really know yet how to get the most out of Go HTML templating. If you did "view source" on a #GoToSocial page, the indexing and formatting was all over the damn place, HTML soup!
Now: I'm not saying I've become an expert, but I think I've improved things somewhat. No more HTML soup! You can "view source" now and it produces readable HTML. I tried to introduce more semantically meaningful HTML elements in there as well, and use aria-labels a bit more diligently to make thread viewing easier.
If you wanna try it out, here's some links to pages on an instance running with the patch. I recommend doing "view source" or "inspect accessibility properties" on them:
We will never accept an invitation to speak to Meta. We are not interested in speaking to Meta. We're not even on Meta's radar, but if they do for some godforsaken reason reach out to us, we will promptly tell Meta (more or less) to fuck off. That's the #GoToSocial promise, baby! Death to capitalism!
#TIL If your #GoToSocial fails to load avatars and the like it might happen that you need to add the respective file storage domain to your domain allowlist.
Gonna write a document about #GoToSocial memory usage and tuning in the coming weeks, now we're getting a better handle on how everything performs. Lots of folks ask us about it so it'd be good to have it written down properly.
Now that #GoToSocial 0.13.0 is out, we are preparing to take a break :)
If you've been following us for a while, you'll know that every year over the holidays we like to make our github repository and matrix channels read only for a while. This lets us step back from support work for a few weeks, and focus on things other than GoToSocial (seeing friends and family, playing video games, reading, cuddling our pets), in order to recharge our mental and emotional batteries and come into the new year feeling fresh and excited again.
This year, we'll take our holiday from (and including) the 19th of December, up to (and including) the 2nd of January. During this time:
the three GtS matrix channels will be read only
the github repo will be read only for non-members of the org (though you may still see us pushing commits and whatnot)
we will be less active on this account
So, if you spot any issues with v0.13.0, please file them before the 19th, or save them until after the 2nd.
As usual, please read the migration notes carefully when upgrading to this version.
Thanks! Enjoy!
Highlights of this release:
Create, view, and vote in polls. It's been a while in the making but GoToSocial now has support for polls, aka Question activity types. You can create, view, and vote in polls using your client of choice.
Show unsupported media placeholders in incoming posts, where media could not be downloaded (temporarily or otherwise). No more dropped media on posts! You'll instead now get a link to the media on the originating instance, that you can click through in your (mobile) browser.
Mute threads that you're being overwhelmed by. Notifications for replies, likes, and boosts in that thread will no longer be generated.
Media cleanup scheduling. Previously media scheduling took place every night at 12am. With the new media scheduling settings in the config, you can customize the schedule to run it at different times and frequencies. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/admin/media_caching/#cleanup
Support for language tags on posts. Language of posts is now correctly federated in and out of your instance. The language of posts is also shown on the web view of statuses and threads.
Gather and expose prometheus format metrics. You can now expose a /metrics endpoint to allow a Prometheus instance to scrape metrics about Go runtime memory usage, http request and database metrics, and more. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/advanced/metrics/
First, Threads is expanding to more countries across Europe, so people there can follow and join the conversations they care about. We’re starting to roll out in more countries now on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store; www.threads.net is live everywhere now.
@mosseri Hello! I'm able to follow you on #threads from a Mastodon instance, but not from a #GoToSocial instance. Relevant error from my GTS logs:
Get: error searching by namestring: accountsByUsernameDomain: error looking up @mosseri as account: enrichAccount: error resolving accountable from data for account https://www.threads.net/ap/users/mosseri/: ResolveAccountable: error unmarshalling bytes into json: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value\n
Note that on SQLite, when you start up your instance an analyze will run when you switch to this version. The analyze might take a good few minutes to run, depending on how large your SQLite database is, and how performant your system is. Please be patient and don't interrupt it, it's optimizing your database :)
As usual, if you find any bugs specific to this release candidate, please open them on our issue tracker.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the release candidate!
What’s the difference between #Mastodon and #Firefish? They both seem to be microblogging platforms in the fediverse. Are they able to talk to each other? I’m a bit ignorant on this atm.
They all have their specificity but they can all communicate (via Activitypub). For example, Misskey and its forks (Firefish and Iceshrimp) can make emoji reaction on posts or even use animations in posts like this. For Mastodon users won’t see them but that doesn’t impact on the communication.
In brief, they are all microblogging services with their own characteristics and UI :akko_thumbup: