aseachange.com

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 126 (good luck charm edition) 🍀​

Good morning Fedi friends!

Yesterday I flew back to Paris and I’m spending the week at my in-laws' with my extended family… my little one still has one more week of school holidays. Working is a little difficult with so many people around (especially children) but I have a lofty goal for today: upgrading my VPS and installing #PeerTube.

The 22nd of the month has been my good luck charm in my self-hosting adventures. I installed #GoToSocial (this account) via #YunoHost on December 22nd, 2024. I successfully installed #Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS with command lines on February 22, 2025. Because of that, I will be saving 30€/month…

So in the spirit of #FOSS exploration, I find it fitting to upgrade my VPS today on April 22… and - my oh my! - install PeerTube via YunoHost… so that I can self-host my upcoming videos about the Fediverse.

The children are playing in the garden and I have about 30 minutes to do all that. Wish me luck!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 122 (where is my extra parachute edition) 🪂​

Good morning Fedi friends!

Today is a BIG day, that I've sort of dreaded a bit: my subscription to #Ghost (Pro) ends today, which means that my old Ghost blog will be scheduled for deletion from their servers.

Now my brand new self-hosted Ghost blog (https://news.elenarossini.com) is all that remains. No extra parachutes, gaaaaah.

I already upgraded Ghost versions with command lines and so far so good... I may be taking snapshots of the VPS every few days just to be on the safe side (my provider does automated weekly backups). Yes yes I know I could set something up with Borg backups and I will in due time. I'm still a newbie after all - who knows very little and just copies and pastes commands.

Self-hosting Ghost will save me $25/month! (I was on a $31/month Creator plan). Because I send less than 3,000 emails a month, I am on a free Mailgun plan now. All I'm paying is $5/month for a VPS.

This means that with the money I'm saving I can upgrade my other VPS (it will cost just $2 more a month) to double its RAM and storage... so I can self-host #PeerTube, yay!

In 10 days I will start production of a Fediverse video with my two interns and I definitely want to publish that on my own (future) PeerTube instance. You know, walking the talk and all that.

A HUGE thank you for all your responses yesterday to my post about Bluesky. It blew up and there were so many replies - DOZENS - all very thoughtful and civilized. This is why I appreciate the Fediverse 💛

Heads-up: I will go offline for the next few hours, so apologies in advance if it takes me a while to respond.

Have a lovely day everyone!

#MySoCalledSudoLife

@dumpsterqueer Hi Tobi, sorry to bother you but I have a question (hoping you will save me a few hours of work with your advice).

Is there a way to download one's GoToSocial feed in text format?

I wanted to compile my self-hosting adventures into a blog post (from my posts on here) to read everything back from the beginning... without resorting to manually copying and pasting everything.

If you have some tips I'm all ears :)

The other day I finally got it. Why #Bluesky is so popular with "regular people" (aka non-techies). It's because it's CENTRALIZED (of course the Bluesky folks would never admit it out right).

One name: Bluesky.
One official URL to join / browse / post messages
One official app: "Bluesky Social" on app stores

In this post-literate society where people have been trained by commercial social media for 2 DECADES to choose the easiest, most frictionless option, of course they will pick Bluesky over the #Fediverse.

Try introducing the concept of servers / instances and names like Mastodon, Sharkey, Pleroma, GoToSocial, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy to people not familiar with them. They'd think you're speaking a foreign language.

The Fediverse is made up of thousands of independent servers. You can't log in to https://joinmastodon.org or https://joinpeertube.org to browse Mastodon or PeerTube. Conversely, when you log into Bluesky you see messages by Bluesky members.

People need to be educated first about defederated options and their numerous advantages.

I get it now. I'm still 1000% in when it comes to the Fediverse but I understand.

And I'm tired.

And I'm posting this here on my GoToSocial account because I wanted to say my piece in one go and I would have run into Mastodon character limits.

How many people have I convinced to join the Fediverse in my 9 months advocating for it through a blog? TWO. How many people are still active on it? One.

Off I go play with LEGOs with my little one - in 12 years, when she's old enough I will set up her own instance. So Fediverse, you gotta be thriving in 2037.

#TheFutureIsFederated

Good morning Fedi friends!

In case you missed it, on Monday I was able to successfully send a newsletter from my self-hosted, manually installed #Ghost blog. So it appears to be fully working now.

🔗​: https://news.elenarossini.com

I don't have any new #selfhosting anecdotes to share. I thought I would be able to relax for a bit and enjoy this milestone. I spent the day yesterday writing a blog post for #TheFutureIsFederated on the topic of resistance to the digital coup.

In the meantime, my 4-year-old spotted some vintage #LEGO panels in the attic. I identified them as belonging to LEGO's King Castle and she demanded I "BUILD IT RIGHT NOW." I'm not even sure I have all the pieces required... I remember that a couple of years ago I found stacks of old LEGO boxes and organized pieces by color in transparent drawers. I found an old manual online for the castle set and so far so good (sort of). I made it to step 10 out of 43. The real test will be building the retractable bridge.

All this to say: no more self-hosting adventures for me this week, I'll be tackling a complex LEGO project (and I can't use code to get out of hurdles...)

#MySoCalledSudoLife #MyLEGOLife

Hello my name is Elena and I'm addicted to #selfhosting.

2 MINUTES after receiving confirmation that my self-hosted Ghost blog is finally working perfectly (newsletter sending included) - something that took 84 DAYS of trial and error and troubleshooting - I've started thinking: "what now?"

Could I be... bored?

Yes.

In a way having a running list of problems to fix was keeping me distracted (by the world at large) and somewhat entertained.

Thank goodness I have another big self-hosting project coming up: #PeerTube.

But maybe I should enjoy this BIG accomplishment for like 5 minutes... or a couple of weeks. No point in installing PeerTube while my 4-year-old has just started a 14 day school holiday. My parents are a huge help but I am basically getting interrupted every 10 minutes... so I can't really dive into something complex 😆

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who helped me with Ghost - I owe you big time!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

#MySoCalledSudoLife #EleSelfHostsGhost

This #GoToSocial account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform #Ghost (and troubleshoot issues) 😆

If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag #EleSelfHostsGhost so you can just mute it.

I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:
✅ I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS
✅ I imported all the old posts and media: https://news.elenarossini.com
✅ I installed #Apache to use #Varnish cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS
✅ I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/ Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)

So far so good.

👹 but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, #Mailgun immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account 😱

It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.

Now, why am I sharing all this?

In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:

https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6

And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.

I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.

Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.

Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation ❤️

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 118 (daredevil edition) 😈​

Good morning Fedi friends!

Guess what? The amazing blogging platform #Ghost has just released an update which adds new features: https://ghost.org/changelog/custom-content-for-every-subscriber/

I am about to update my Ghost installation FOR THE FIRST TIME using command lines - aaaaaarghhhhhhh. Not gonna lie, my heart is beating fast.

But first! I'm taking a snapshot of the whole VPS in case something goes wrong.

As usual, wish me luck 😅​

Update: my wireless mouse just drained its battery and became unresponsive. It's an Apple mouse with the charging port at the bottom. So I will have to recharge it a bit and carry on with the update later. There's no way I will do it now with a 1% mouse battery level - in case anything goes wrong 🫠

Update no.2: the update was quick, easy and successful YAY 🥳

#MySoCalledSudoLife

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 117 (Titanic edition) 🛥️

When I think of all my efforts, trials and tribulations with self-hosting my Ghost blog, the first thing that comes to mind is the animated GIF from the movie Titanic, with present-day Rose ruefully saying « It’s been 84 years ».

I keep a diary - a printed calendar with notes about my #selfhosting exploits - to keep track of milestones and progress. It turns out the first time I tried to self-host Ghost via #YunoHost was January 20th (that’s when I installed it on my Debian VPS). So not that long ago. But it does feel like 84 years LOL.

My latest obstacle was a frozen Mailgun account because they flagged me as a spammer the first time I tried to send a blog post as a newsletter.

My account has been fully reinstated (as of Friday evening) so hopefully things will go smoothly now.

Triple-checking Mailgun <-> Ghost configurations is not my ideal way to spend a Sunday morning, but I should take advantage of my parents looking after my little one. Let’s go 👩🏻‍💻

#MySoCalledSudoLife