Owning back my place in the Fediverse - part 2

Introduction

13 months ago, I decided to open my GoToSocial instance. As I wrote in December 2022 after launching it, I had a previous experience managing a (personal) mastodon instance… And I stopped because it was too “painful”. After a bit more than a year of managing a GoToSocial instance, I can tell that it is very simple and as boring as any maintenance should be!

Maintenance

Maintenance are usually easy, fast and without backward incompatibility. Well done to the great dev team and contributors as it always worked as expected! I enjoy running this small instance!

For now, GoToSocial is running on a small droplet (1CPU, 1GB RAM) at digitalocean. I’m planning to migrate it to my new homelab since I have more confidence in the hardware and the internet connection since my move here. I’m a bit afraid of this change, but I’ve heard about other doing it easily so I’m going to say this is a goal for 2024, but we’ll see^^.

Usually CPU is used below 20%, with few small spikes here and there, but never big enough to be a problem. Average load is usually below 1 even during small spikes. Between 70 and 80% of the RAM is used all the time. Storage stays at a descent level as it uses around 4.1GB, but that will massively depends on the number of assets the people you follow are sharing. I don’t follow artists so I guess it stay low because of my usage.

Over the past year, feature coverage have grown and GoToSocial now has all the feature I wanted, including #hashtags listing that was a key missing point for me. It’s still an unfinished project, but progress are made regularly.

Usage

Since its creation and until the start of 2024, my GoToSocial had 2 users: my main account and an admin one where people can report me to myself :). Never used the admin one to be honest, but it’s there just in case. I’ve been slowly but surely moving from framapiaf to GoToSocial my primary account. I still use my framapiaf account from time to time boost or react to a toot though. That’s because I still use it to follow hashtags with more content (being a “big” shared instance) than my GoToSocial one.

Also until this year, I’ve been only using pinaphore (and semaphore fork) as a web client on my laptop and tusky on my phone. But that has changed recently (read below).

I do spend more time on the fediverse than before, maybe a bit too much for my liking… It is mainly due to having back tusky on my phone… Going to work a bit on that, but thanks to having a small instance and not following too many people, there is a limited amount of content I can see on my phone (I didn’t connect my framapiaf account on it).

Why do I still have my framapiaf account?

As stated above, I still have and use my framapiaf account. I don’t use it to interact with others anymore, but I still use it to read pinned hashtags I want to follow. The main drawback of using a personal instance and is that discovery of new user / content is harder. By using my framapiaf account I see a lot more toot in my saved hashtags.

I’m hoping that one day I will not need it anymore, but for now I still do. In any case, I won’t delete it as it will always be a secondary account just in case.

New usage for 2024

This year, I’ve decided to use my instance more. How you may asked. Well, I’m not implying to toot more (or less), that will depends as usual about my mood and motivation. But I’m using a personal instance here, so I thought maybe I could leverage account for different needs?

New accounts

At first I thought that maybe splitting per language would be a good idea, having a French speaking one and an English one. But quickly realise it will too annoying for me and not really useful for others. I don’t toot that much in French anyway, except for replying to a French toot. Non French speaking people may want to hide my responses… :).

So, how will I use it more? Well, I’ve decided to create 2 (so far) bot accounts:

• One blog BOT that will toot a message for each new post on my blog.
• One link BOT that will toot a message for each new link I publicly share on my bookmark software (I’m using linkding)

I’ll write about the full setup in another post, but TLDR; is that I’m using Feed2fedi to publish RSS feeds to my GoToSocial instance. Because linkding does not provide (yet) an RSS feeds for public shared link, I’m using RSS Bridge to cheat and create an RSS feed for me. Doing so, I can still use Feed2fedi to create toots for new item in the feed provided by RSS Bridge, and avoiding created an equivalent of Feed2fedi based on linkding API. Maybe I’ll find other cool usage of RSS Bridge for future additional usage too :).

I’m also thinking about implementing the same for my gemlog, but it will be a bit more complex because either I need to rewrite URLs of my current gemlog feed available via HTTPS, or use a gemini → web portal to use the feed of my capsule directly. I haven’t decided yet but that something that will be done at some point :).

I don’t know if I’ll create more bots or not, but I like the idea of splitting things like that. I can still boost any automated message from my main user if needed. I don’t think I’ll share everything each time, but the one I want to focus on and write maybe a more custom message around them.

I also created two test accounts just to try stuff before doing them with real users, so you should neither care nor follow any of them.

New client

Moving to this multi account setup made me realise that semaphore is not built for using many users. I didn’t care having 1 semaphone tab opened and another with my framapiaf account, but if I wanted quick access to the blog or links account (or even the tests one), it would be very painful. Hence the start of my search for a multi account client, either for desktop (linux) or web. Even though tusky does this already, I don’t want to add more users on my phone. My main account is enough there so I don’t “waste” even more time than I already do on social media.

I tried a few different clients, but with my requirements, seems the list was not long. To avoid a longer than needed post (too late?), I won’t go through all my tests. I ended up selecting sengi that I installed on my homelab. While the domain is public, my sengi instance is only available via my local network and not from outside because I was not comfortable hosting it for others (and it runs on an ultra small container at the moment).

My setup is a bit crazy, as I added all (7!) users in sengi (main, framapiaf, instance admin, blog BOT, link BOT, testuser, testuser2). But to be fair, sengi does a really nice job allowing me to configure it to have the columns I want in the right order. At the end I configured the following columns:

• home main account
• #homelab hashtag via framapiaf account
• and other hashtags via framapiaf (3 others columns)
• Same hashtags as framapiaf (4 columns)

Seems a lot, but Sengi does a great job for multiple accounts owner :).

Conclusion

I’m not sure where this is going to be honest :D. I’m thinking having a personal instance is a good reason to try having this type of setup, so people who prefers following blogs or others via the fediverse (even though they should use RSS :p) have that choice now. You can follow only my blog/links accounts just to receive updates from my blog or shared links, or my main account if you are interested in the non sense I can write there.

Maybe more to come, maybe not, 2024 will tell :).