mastodon

The single-user mastodon instance that I created a while back has just been doing its thing for a while. I didn’t add a relay so the only stuff I saw was directly followed users. A couple of weeks ago, I added https://bigrelay.social/inbox to feed some of the hashtags I’m following. This caused some emails to show up from Honeycomb about my usage going way up!

When running other people’s software, there are a variety of ways that one can impact the deployment. Developers typically provide a set of configurations that can be set during deployment. Additional configurations are available once it’s running. These are design choices to decide which levers to provide and how flexible to make them. I wanted my instance to do some stuff that the latest release doesn’t do.

You know how every time any startup deployed software for the 2010s, a news article was posted 6-12 months later about how their files were all stored in a completely unprotected S3 bucket? It’s my turn and it’s a speedrun!

Since the Fediverse stuff is catching on, I decided to upgrade the deployment. New name, Kubernetes deployment, encryption, the whole thing. Also moving my account across instances went pretty well.

I feel compelled to write this up because of the struggles I faced along the way. Nothing was terrible or difficult but some of the docs were outdated and I had to find random gists and do some code archeology.