Jack Baty
I'm Jack - Director of Unspecified Services
I'm into photography (film and digital), analog tools (typewriters, fountain pens, cassettes) and tinkering with software. I spend too much time messing with my Emacs config. I'll try just about anything once.
- Main Blog: baty.net
If a permissions dialog popped up on my Mac saying, "Hey I'm gonna delete all your shit and burn down your house!" I'd probably hit "Allow" without even looking. macOS can be tedious.
What an absolutely beautiful day.
Running a single user #littleFedi instance feels like having my own personal little microblog. Doesn't bode well for the shorter /notes on baty.net when I'd rather just make a quick post here.
@eclecticpassions@fosstodon.org @petebrown@social.lol It's designed to run fine on a little Raspberry Pi in the closet, or so I'm told :)
@petebrown@social.lol It's on the same Hetzner VPS as the rest of my stuff (2GB). It's also running behind Caddy. I love software that's just a single binary. Fire and forget, mostly :)
I tend to forget about tilde.club. That's a shame. I've been ~jbaty there since Paul Ford started it in 2014.
@brennan@social.lol wrote a great piece about it: Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse · brennan.day
I'm no stranger to self hosting Fediverse/ActivityPub applications.
Crikey, I ran Laconica back in 2009 when @evan@cosocial.ca still had a moustache.
I have also hosted GotoSocial and Pleroma. Never took the step to get Mastodon running (seemed too heavyweight, complex and intimidating).
However, I can't emphasise how different #LittleFedi is for a normal, non-technical user who has some spare hosting capacity available and just wants to install, configure a Fediverse presence and then forget about it.
Which seems precisely the design aim of LittleFedi and this quote from @stefano@bsd.cafe really resonated with me.
'What I kept wanting was something I could put on a small machine, in a corner, and then stop
thinking about. No runtime to keep current, no database server to babysit, no container stack, no
build pipeline that breaks the week I am travelling'.
https://littlefedi.org/index.html
[ PS. I received no authentic Italian pizzas for creating this post ]
They did a good job, because this should have been terrible and it wasn't. It was great nostalgia, but otherwise I didn't care much.
After not nearly enough consideration or testing, I went ahead and migrated my social.lol identity here to social.baty.net. It seems to have worked, but I have to leave for a few hours, so if something breaks, my timing was poor, too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyway, it's fun and so far I'm enjoying littleFedi.
@jack @andyc@yakshaving.social Well, I didn't wait. Thanks for the nudge. I'll blame you when things break 😁
@andyc@yakshaving.social Good to know! I may wait for at least one round of upgrades and let things burn in for a few days before I try the migration. But yeah, #littleFedi sure feels like something that's been in use for a while.
@andyc@yakshaving.social Makes sense, thanks. Let us know how the migration goes. I've not been brave enough to move followers yet.
I'm learning that there's just no way I'm going to journal in a paper notebook before bed. I never think of it until I'm already in bed and that's too late. You know what works great in bed, though? A laptop with Emacs open.
I changed my Denote config to create Markdown files instead of Org mode files. This is a big deal for me, as most of my life has been in something-something.org for more than a decade. I'm tired of fighting every other app in the world's markup. Denote is agnostic, so no skin of my teeth.
For now, I predict that most of my posts here will be about #littleFedi and where it fits for me. It'll get boring quickly, but until I make this the "official" identity, I'll mostly only be tinkering.
littleFedi
littleFedi is "A small ActivityPub server written in Go"
It was officially released (I think) yesterday, and is another project from Stefano Marinelli of BSSG fame.
A few years ago I'd decided I wanted to "own my content" 🙄 so I ran an instance of Mastodon. Mastodon is overkill and I didn't enjoy it. Then, later, I installed an instance of Go2Social, which worked well. Trouble was, I was all-in with social media at the time and being on a single-user instance felt lonely...nothing useful in "local" or "trending". Discovery was difficult. It was just me and I didn't like it.
Fast forward to today, and things have changed. I've deleted all of my Meta-related accounts and LinkedIn. I thought about quitting Mastodon as well, but FOMO always gets the better of me.
Since I would rather not quit Mastodon completely, I figured I would try running a single-user instance again. Maybe the quiet would be good for me.
I'd seen @Stefano's posts about a new ActivityPub server he was working on and the timing of the first release couldn't be better, so I installed it today at Jack Baty Social.
It's running on my Hetzner VPS behind Caddy as a proxy. I love Caddy. Here's the entire Caddy config for the domain:
social.baty.net {
encode gzip
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8081
}
I've just started poking around, but littleFedi seems like it's got a lot going for it. At first I wanted to use my root domain for my handle (@jack@baty.net) but since I'd previously used that via Ghost, I ran into caching issues and didn't want to bother, so now I'm @jack@social.baty.net.
The big question is whether to migrate followers there, or start fresh and maybe just announce the move from my main @jbaty@social.lol account. I think I'll give it a minute before deciding.
littleFedi is a compelling new entry in the FediverseSpaceArena.
I have a scheduled task every Sunday to run updates on the computers and confirm that backups are working. This includes the Linux machines, even though I've been running mostly on macOS. I'm typing this on the Framework because during the updates I was reminded that I prefer this machine to my MacBook Air M2. Great. This means I'm still going to be using two OSes, which I really wanted to avoid.
Now that I'm back on macOS and haven't been using Emacs for a week, I should probably start over with my followers because most of them will be bored with me, now.