Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂

Italian writer, photographer and filmmaker based in Paris, France. Fediverse cheerleader.

I run the newsletter #TheFutureIsFederated which aims to explain the numerous benefits of the Fediverse to people not familiar with it.

I recently started learning Linux and self-hosting and I'm sharing stories about this new journey with the hashtag #MySoCalledSudoLife.

I'm a :LegoLogo: aficionada.

My values are: :BlackLivesMatter: :Feminist: :HeartPride: :HeartTrans: :NoNazis:

Public Key

npub1gassdj537rmrs5e4k3wsd322nvztvqr92844cc0c8edhgqcsvt0sn57xl5

NIP-05 Address

elena@aseachange-com.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsywcgxe2glpa3c2v6mghgxc49fkp9kqpj4r66uv8urukm5qvgx9hcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqgkwaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8qunfd4skctnwv46qvdxax2

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

relay.primal.net

Author Public Key

npub1gassdj537rmrs5e4k3wsd322nvztvqr92844cc0c8edhgqcsvt0sn57xl5

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Published at

2025-04-19T18:01:50Z

Kind type

0 Metadata

Event JSON

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Last Notes

2025-04-25 15:15:57

🌶️ Fedi hot take 🌶️
I saw several toots posted in the past 24 hours that said: "yeah, Bluesky was down, but the same thing could have happened to mastodon.social, home of 15% of accounts on the Fediverse."
You know what I did when mastodon.social went down? (I remember it happened a couple of months ago during a routine upgrade)
Well, when the INSTANCE mastodon.social went down, I simply switched to my GoToSocial account and checked out from there what people were posting. Maybe I even logged onto my Pixelfed account.
People on Bluesky couldn't do something like that because Bluesky is FULLY CENTRALIZED.
You can't compare apples and oranges.
End of my hot take sorry if I have offended friends who are super enthusiastic about Bluesky, but I can't just politely nod and stay silent. Bluesky enthusiasts, please read up about the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
I want the Open Social Web to succeed... but I will always give the side eye to Bluesky and Threads. Sorry not sorry.
On a more positive note: I just wrote about some new projects I'll start soon to promote the Fediverse: https://elenarossini.com/2025/04/my-fedi-activism-q2-2025-edition/

2025-04-22 15:36:08

#AskFedi: a question for people self-hosting #PeerTube: when you create your own instance, PeerTube automatically creates a root user - which is the instance's admin.
I created a second user - another admin - with a name I prefer... but I can't delete root... and find it a little annoying to see that root is already federating (aka I could find it via a fedi search). Do you have any advice about how to proceed?
thank you in advance! 🙏

2025-04-22 12:29:28

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Here we go again!
Hello self-hosted #PeerTube 🤗 :fediverse:
https://aseachange.com/fileserver/01ENCW3D083ATDAP5WGJEMSJC8/attachment/original/01JSEQF7A4HQ8T55K5H3RCPRXY.jpeg

2025-04-22 12:04:37

🏕️ 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

2025-04-19 17:26:05

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@nprofile…ndcz To add to this, a counter experience I had a bunch of times in the U.S.
I would order a ristretto - say at Starbucks or Blue Bottle Coffee - and the barista would immediately say, with a worried tone: "Are you sure? It's really small." To which, I would reply: "Yes, I'm sure, I'm Italian" 😅

2025-04-19 07:31:07

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@nprofile…ndcz Italian here. In Italy you order "a coffee" at the bar and they give you a ristretto. That's it. No huge monstruosity with extra hot water in a cup or 40g of added sugar via syrups 🤷‍♀️

2025-04-18 12:37:07

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@nprofile…y54t @nprofile…u4lq @nprofile…y6pz I had the same experience with my filmmaking / activist communities. It's sad to see they only gave the Fediverse a short try (if that, even) and then immediately gravitated towards the dopamine hits of Bluesky.
BTW your photography is amazing and so are your videos Ewen. I'm so glad you're active on the Fediverse, leading the way ❤️

2025-04-18 09:12:11

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@nprofile…ndcz I'm old enough to remember when Apple offered iWeb as part of its iLife package (with Pages, Numbers, etc.), a tool to create websites and blogs. When they discountinued it (in 2011 according to Wikipedia), I was like: uh-oh, this is not good. And then everyone turned en masse to closed silos driven by algorithms, making blogs obsolete. Until Substack emerged (yikes times a million). I'm super grateful to Wordpress federation and Ghost turning in that direction... and sorry if I went off on a tangent

2025-04-17 15:13:59

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@nprofile…y54t @nprofile…y6pz Yeah the "everybody shouting, nobody listening" describes it to a T for me. It feels like any other commercial network where people post messages - as if they were sending out a press release - and pray for it to be seen by as many people as possible.
On the Fediverse I have created so many amazing connections and genuine friendships...

2025-04-17 15:01:39

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@nprofile…jt4v @nprofile…5wev I hear you. At the risk of sounding condescending, it feels like another chapter of the Eternal September (and I was too young to experience it back in the day)... I LOVE this corner of the internet and wouldn't change a single thing. it just makes me sad that (1) the vast majority of non-techies are opting for algo-driven networks with cheap dopamine hits (2) some awesome people I got to know on the Fediverse have moved over to Bluesky 😢

2025-04-17 09:35:13

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

2025-04-14 12:02:44

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

2025-04-14 11:30:03

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A quick update: for the first time ever it appears that I successfully sent (and received) a newsletter from my self-hosted Ghost blog 🥳
If you subscribe to my Elena Rossini updates and you got the email, please let me know. All fingers and toes crossed this time around things were ok.
My Ghost (Pro) subscription renews in 4 days... I could stop that as soon as I get confirmation that my self-hosted Ghost blog works as intended.
#MySoCalledSudoLife #EleSelfHostsGhost

2025-04-14 10:52:34

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 ❤️

2025-04-11 10:38:09

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 115 (am I a spammer? edition) 🧌
Hello Fedi friends,
I've been a little quiet this week because I have been dealing with an onslaught of unpleasant things over the past 6-7 days. Some are small things, some are really serious and I'm totally exhausted as a result. I'm just being completely transparent here because often life on the internet is based on a big lie and only highlight reels. My week has majorly sucked. But! In the words of Eckhart Tolle: "Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life." Today, right this minute, things are good.
Self-hosting and learning Linux are the things that typically keep me distracted and uplifted. I'm afraid my recent messages have turned into a litany of complaints. I didn't mean to - sorry about that!
Yes, attempts to self-host my Ghost blog have been mired with difficulties at literally every turn. Botched installations, the Mastodon Hug of Death once my blog was ready for its debut... and now? I cannot send a single blog post as a newsletter because Mailgun (the company providing the newsletter integration to Ghost) has flagged me as a spammer and has frozen my account. I have an open ticket and hope this will be resolved soon.
How did this happen? I have no clue. I tried to send a blog post as a newsletter to 210 people (yes ONLY 210 people), it didn't work, the Ghost interface suggested I try again... I did it twice, but I got a "failed to send a newsletter message". Oddly in the Ghost interface there were stats that the newsletter was sent to 210 people with 0% open rate (it's my personal newsletter that had 65% open rate last time around). I'm subscribed to it for testing and didn't receive a thing. The thing that works seamlessly is sending test blog posts to my own address. But truly sending blog posts as newsletters fails every time.
Now Mailgun thinks I'm some kind of awful spammer keen on sending marketing messages to strangers. Ouf. They sent me a really long questionnaire about my intentions, my expected monthly volume, etc. Again, the ticket is open and I hope they will unfreeze my account soon. My sending volume is so tiny, it's a bit ridiculous to be dealing with this.
I had to re-activate my Ghost (Pro) account before its expiration on April 18th just to be on the safe side and have a plan B.
It's frustrating to be honest. But c'est la vie.
On the upside, I had reached out to Ghost's founder John O'Nolan to report the JSON code bug (in their documentation) and the maxAge cache issue on the default self-hosted plans... he sent me the nicest email thanking me for the feedback and said they will immediately fix the JSON instructions and implement a new maxAge setting (higher than zero) in the next Ghost release. I'm so excited and grateful for this! Newbie me - with your help!!! - managed to create some positive changes for Ghost. It's the best feeling.
The silver lining in all the self-hosted Ghost troubles is that I'm learning A TON. If every step had gone smoothly the first time around, I would not have learned so much about command lines, Nginx configurations, cache settings or DNS records.
I'm staying curious and very grateful for all the lessons.
And I want to thank you once again for your generosity, helping out as soon as I have a question / report a problem. I'm really touched by your kindness.
Wishing you all a lovely day and weekend.
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-04-11 10:38:09

2025-04-08 12:02:22

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 112 (scary Ghost edition) 👻
Hello Fedi friends!
I'm currently putting the finishing touches to a post on my brand new, self-hosted #Ghost blog (https://news.elenarossini.com).
Very soon, I will test two things:
1) the newsletter integration (hoping everything will run smoothly)
2) the "Mastodon hug of death" - aka I will post a link to it on Mastodon and I will see what happens when the article's preview card will be fetched by hundreds of Fediverse servers.
I need to go pick up my little one from nursery school in 90 minutes so pray for me everything goes smoothly 😅
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-04-02 08:02:42

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 106 (email edition) 📫
Good morning Fedi friends!
I'm DELIGHTED to report that my self-hosted Ghost blog is fully functional and it withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (so far, knock on wood).
TWO challenges remain:
1) fixing mail DNS records (TXT & DMARC) so that people who sign up for my newsletter won't get a warning that the email "failed the domain's authentication requirements" - thank you for the heads-up @nprofile…6px9!
For some strange reason the warning appears for email signups but not newsletter sends. So I will investigate this morning and add some code to the Ghost config file too (in addition to triple-checking DNS records). Thank you @nprofile…y6t0 @nprofile…7649 @nprofile…4tt2 for the brilliant tips and guidance 🙏
2) The announcement I shared yesterday on my Mastodon account (5000+ followers) with the link to my new Ghost blog didn't overwhelm the VPS. But! The toot didn't contain a link with a preview card that had to be fetched by hundreds of servers. So, the real test will be publishing a new blog post and seeing how it holds up when it's shared on Mastodon. My heartbeat accelerates just thinking about it 😅
Advocating for FOSS also means contributing to projects with feedback, etc. (as someone eloquently said to me here a few months ago - sorry if I can't credit you, it's been a while). Anyway, all this to say that I will write to Ghost devs today (and John) to tell them about the buggy code that's on their Configurations page. And to suggest a tweak that may help other self-hosted sites withstand sudden traffic from Mastodon. It worked for me, so I feel like it's important to spread the word, since many people have been struggling with the same issue.
Anyway, a HUGE thanks once again to @nprofile…8we7 @nprofile…9chj @nprofile…nhk5 @nprofile…mvfh @nprofile…er0u @nprofile…k63h @nprofile…gnxx @nprofile…70tu who helped me debug the code yesterday. Infinitely grateful to you for all your advice and help! I was THIS CLOSE to giving up... and now I'm thrilled to be self-hosting my Ghost blog.
Wishing you all a wonderful day!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-04-01 12:44:37

Since you are all extremely knowledgeable about this stuff and super generous with me with your help (THANK YOU), I'd like to ask you a question that is a bit embarrassing (in a "I'm a newbie please excuse my cluelessness" sort of way).
So having tackled the giant cache hurdle, now I find myself facing an email authentication problem (of course).
I definitely did set up DNS TXT records for Mailgun... but apparently I need to add some code to my Ghost config file to avoid having a warning on my email signups.
Self-hosted Ghost users say the code should look like this:
"mail": {
"from": "'Ghost Server' ghost@example.com",
"transport": "SMTP",
"options": {
"service": "Mailgun",
"host": "smtp.eu.mailgun.org",
"port": 465,
"secureConnection": true,
"auth": {
"user": "ghost@example.com",
"pass": "PASSWORD"
}
}
},
Now, for the auth user and pass I need to enter the email address and password for my Mailgun account, right? I'm a little confused.
And totally shameless now as you can tell.
And excuse me while I run hide in a corner (for having asked a silly question). I'm TRULY a newbie as you can tell.
P.S.: thank you for putting up with me 😅
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-04-01 10:37:47

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 105 (:Terminal: edition) 💫
Good morning Fedi friends!
I just spent 3 hours tweaking Ghost caching configurations in Terminal. It was a lot of A/B testing, with JSON error messages. I asked for advice on Mastodon, sharing a screenshot of the buggy code and got a solution within ONE minute. I'm just so grateful! 🥰
Now I have "JSON Parser" in my bookmarks bar. What have I become, LOL? Honestly, I'm having so much fun learning all this.
Anyway, I was successfully able to change the caching maxAge from 0 to... 600. I'm hoping that when I share a link to my new self-hosted blog on Mastodon, the whole VPS won't go down within seconds (as it happened multiple times over the past week).
So, trying out a little experiment here because on GoToSocial I have fewer followers. Here is my self-hosted Ghost blog, my pride and joy (and source of occasional headaches). Let me know if it works for you:
https://news.elenarossini.com
Wishing you all a lovely day!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-28 13:53:24

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OMG it seems to be working!!!!
I'm very proud of myself because following instructions online I was able to:
Install Apache
Install Varnish
Point Varnish to Ghost - changing the port number
Point Nginx to Varnish - by going into the sites-enabled folder and changing the port number
I tested it and Varnish appeared to be running!
Then I had a weird 503 error, but I restarted Varnish and poof! it went away.
I know it's EXTREMELY confusing for me to have TWO identical Ghost blogs right now, but one is the self-hosted mirror (subdomain: news) of the paid plan (subdomain: blog).
I am 30 minutes away from picking up my child from nursery school, which means: no more work for the rest of the day. And this weekend we will be with friends, so technically, no more work till Monday morning. I know I'm tempting the gods, but here we go: https://news.elenarossini.com 🙈

2025-03-28 13:21:07

About to install Varnish on my Ubuntu VPS - wish me luck!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-28 09:18:12

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 101 (perseverance edition) 👷‍♀️
Good morning Fedi friends!
I'm putting the finishing touches to a blog post about #PeerTube - from the POV of creators. I look forward to publishing it soon so I can devote the rest of the day to fixing my self-hosted Ghost blog issues.
Yes yes yes I know I keep going back-and-forth on this, so I apologize for the "flip-flopping" but I recently got an amazing shout out on a Fediverse podcast... but that shout-out mentioned my self-hosting woes so as I matter of pride I wanna fix them with code. I'm not done yet! I'm a fighter by nature.
I rebuilt my entire Ghost blog (33 posts and counting) from scratch TWO TIMES this year. After stepping away from the problem for 5 days, I'm ready to dive back in.
Disabling the Mastodon preview cards (for links) would fix all my problems but first I wanna see what happens when I tweak my NGINX config file.
I'm in the self-hosting game for the LONG HAUL! Undeterred, ready to learn. Let's do this.
(And THANK YOU FOR YOUR AMAZING SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT throughout all my stumbles).
Wishing you all a lovely Friday.
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-28 08:20:50

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@nprofile…gg0f Thank YOUUUUU!!! #YunoHost changed my life in the best possible way ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

2025-03-27 10:57:58

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 100 (milestones edition) 🎊
Good morning Fedi friends!
Today I'm filled with gratitude as I think back about all the ways I have changed - and become more empowered - since I installed @nprofile…gg0f on my VPS on December 17, 2024.
The biggest difference is my state of mind. For example, yesterday I started using #PeerTube, after setting up an account on the instance MakerTube. I am enjoying it IMMENSELY. I uploaded a couple of my videos there but then immediately thought: I should set up my own instance!
If you had told me 4 months ago that one day I would be a couple of clicks away from setting up my own PeerTube, I would have thought you were hallucinating. But #YunoHost has given me this power and confidence – for which I am infinitely grateful.
Since early February 2025 I have also gotten a bit of experience installing things on a separate VPS with command lines. Even if my self-hosted Ghost blog has given me lemons so far (Mastodon Hug of Death, you're to blame for this!) I am undeterred. I will try tweaking my NGINX settings next week, to set up a reverse proxy and increase my cache. Or heck, I could block Mastodon preview card requests and all my problems would go away. (If someone knows how to do that, please let me know!)
100 days of self-hosting, wow! I feel like a completely different person. Digital sovereignty rocks.
What are my goals for the next 100 days?
1) solving my self-hosted Ghost blog troubles
2) getting an education in caching, reverse proxies and the like
3) setting up my PeerTube instance
Thank you for encouraging me to go on this journey and for all your incredible advice and generous offers to help. This is truly the best community ❤️
#MySoCalledSudoLife #YunoHost

2025-03-26 11:03:00

Good morning Fedi friends!
It's been 99 days since I started self-hosting my own Fediverse instances. Crazy how time flies!
I've been a bit absent from here this week because I started exploring the world of #PeerTube from the POV of a creator.
I just set up my own account on #MakerTube - so that I can write a guide that is accessible to many (as opposed to skipping this step and going straight to self-hosting).
Anyway, here is my PeerTube account: https://makertube.net/a/elena/video-channels
I have been able to follow it from #Mastodon and #Friendica without a problem, but I keep getting an error message when I try to subscribe with my #GoToSocial username. The exact message: "Cannot fetch information from this remote account." Does anybody have the same issue? (as in: people on GoToSocial, can you subscribe to PeerTube channels?)
Wishing you all a lovely day 🌞
P.S.: about to go offline for the rest of the day because... there's no pre-school in France on Wednesdays and the garderie keeps my little one up until 12:30. So apologies in advance if I'm slow to reply to messages.
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-24 12:48:37

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🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 97 (tiramisu edition) 🍮
Good morning Fedi friends!
If you read my toots this weekend, you may be familiar with the onslaught of issues I faced with my self-hosted Ghost blog.
The short version is: as soon as I unveiled its URL, I started to edit old toots in Mastodon - updating articles with the new address of my blog. Problem was: those toots were quite popular, with over 150 shares and hundreds of likes. I experienced the "Mastodon Hug of Death" AKA dozens of independent servers trying to fetch the blog preview image... which immediately overwhelmed my VPS and made it go offline. So my new visitors were very confused and immediately reported that the URL of my new blog didn't work. All this because I had failed to set up a cache / reverse proxy. Aw the things you learn!
I was feeling pretty dejected on Saturday about this whole ordeal but when I woke up on Sunday (see previous toot in this chain) I recaptured my fighting spirit. I thought: I put so much work into this blog - like, really - I cannot possibly give up now. So I resolved to add a CDN to it to help with incoming requests / traffic.
This was yesterday - aka Sunday - aka a day I'm supposed to spend offline with my husband and child. Every time they went off to play a game, I had 10 precious minutes to try something. And friends, my attempts got squashed all over again in the worst possible way.
I tried BunnyCDN first. Very easy and fast to set up, even if the onboarding is missing key information. My site was cached by them super quickly but then I had to delete ALL my DNS records otherwise I couldn't add a CNAME config to it - it was conflicting with all my DNS records for the subdomain.
Fine! I did that even if it meant deleting TXT records linked to the Mailgun newsletter. "I'll deal with that later" I thought. (And yes, deleting them was necessary otherwise the DNS panel wouldn't allow me to add a CNAME).
With the CNAME added I kept getting a 508 loop error, I reached out to support, they answered super quickly but didn't give me instructions about how to do things correctly. It was all very confusing, assuming I was an advanced sysadmin. So after 3 emails with them I gave up. I deleted the setup, went back and re-created my DNS records but then the SSL certificate was broken. Ouf. I thought: certainly I just have to wait for DNS records to propagate. And that was the case this morning (HUGE sigh of relief).
Then I tried Cloudflare (yikes, didn't want to) just to see if the setup was easier and saw right off the bat that I couldn't add a subdomain... they require a top level domain even though my TLD is linked to a self-hosted Wordpress site on my hosting provider, whereas the subdomain is linked to a VPS with a totally different IP address.
My self-hosting confidence has taken the worst beating EVER but I'm 3 days away from celebrating 100 days of self-hosting. So I will try one last resort: editing NGINX records to set up caching that way. And/or reverse proxy, I'm not really sure what this all means but I will try. @nprofile…nqs0 sent me this great link: https://scotthelme.co.uk/caching-ghost-with-nginx/
I just need to step away from this for a day or two because this whole ordeal was a major letdown. I called this update the "tiramisu" edition because in Italian tiramisu means "pull me up" / "cheer me up."
Silver lining: I now have a life hack for handling situations like these. I need to keep a to do list with simple techie tasks I can solve... to restore a sense of accomplishment during challenging times. Like: everything may be bad, but at least I did ___.
THANK YOU for the dozens of messages you sent me this weekend, sorry I was mostly offline with my family and will try to reply to each one of you now.
Wishing you a great week!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-22 10:57:09

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🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 95 part 2, white flag edition 🏳️
I turned my self-hosted Ghost blog private (for now) while I figure out reverse proxy / cache solutions for it.
It's absolutely ridiculous that the whole VPS would get overwhelmed by links to it shared on Mastodon.
Yesterday was a bit of a nightmare. I announced the new URL, tweaked an old toot to update the URL of a popular pinned article about PeerTube (pointing to my new self-hosted blog) and because the link had a preview card that servers had to fetch, the VPS immediately went offline. So people reading my announcement immediately reported they couldn't access the site. So embarrassing.
I'll plan to spend the weekend reflecting on the next steps.
Solution A: staying on my Ghost(Pro) plan which right now looks like a great deal for the money (considering all the features they offer, the lack of stress on my end and the superb customer support). Self-hosting would save me 5 dollars a month at best if I factor in a VPS, Mailgun newsletter integration and a CDN.
Am I so cheap that I will go through all this stress and uncertainty to save 5 dollars a month? Methinks not.
I just have a bruised ego because I literally spent 20+ hours moving the blog and I even started over from scratch twice. Yes I did the whole thing TWICE. First time around I found out at the last second the YunoHost installation was on mariaDB and no longer supported by the official Ghost team. Support had stopped 2 years ago even! So I signed up for a new VPS, installed everything from scratch with command lines... and the second I debuted the new thing, the VPS went offline because of a Mastodon toot with 100+ boosts. Who would have thought? The whole endeavor feels really cursed.
Solution B: figuring out reverse proxy / caching solutions... with no guarantees that a popular toot on Mastodon won't take down my whole VPS.
You can see where I'm leaning.
Aw the joys and pains of self-hosting! Lesson learned: sometimes a managed hosting solution can be a great investment and give you peace of mind.
#MySoCalledSudoLife #INeedAHug

2025-03-22 06:25:41

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 95 ✨
Saturday morning, I naturally wake up at 6:20am (as usual) and proceed to spend almost an hour researching reverse proxies, caching utilities and CDNs for my self-hosted Ghost blog… to prevent the “Mastodon Hug of Death”.
I’m now scared at the idea of sharing a link to my blog that comes with a preview card, because it’s like I’m “DDOS’ing” my own site (words from someone’s blog about this issue, sorry I can’t properly quote them).
I thought that once my site was up and running, it would be smooth sailing from there. Aw how naive I was 😭
It’s worth pointing out that I have 3 Wordpress sites - all federated - and even when I share blog posts that get popular on Mastodon, I never run into server issues. So this is a little moment of gratitude for my web host, its native CDN and my Wordpress caching plugin. Ouf. This self-hosted Ghost blog is a little cursed I tell you!
I still have a paid Ghost(Pro) plan and I’m having serious second thoughts about keeping it / dumping this whole self-hosted thing. Again.
It’s not a good feeling to be afraid that a popular blog post could take my whole site down… especially when I’m away from my computer (aka half the day, when I’m with my child) or when I’m asleep. This never happened on my Ghost (Pro) plan, even when I had 100+ boosts on a blog post.
Silver lining: I’m learning new things.
Oh and I don’t mean to be a downer on a Saturday morning. I’m sorry. On the upside, I’m super grateful for all your supportive messages, your bug reports and your links to solutions. This is truly the best community ❤️
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-21 17:26:16

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@nprofile…lqnp Today I learned about the “Mastodon Hug of Death” thanks to @nprofile…s7fy : https://ilja.space/objects/db760a86-6347-4168-8f2d-0870073477ac 🤯🤯🤯
Feeling totally validated now! I wasn’t hallucinating when I noticed my entire Ghost blog would go offline when I updated old URLs in Mastodon. I had to restored from backups twice today. Speechless!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-20 09:21:07

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 93 ✨
Thanks to the brilliant advice of @nprofile…0zju I have found an easy-to-implement, no sweat solution for my redirect issue. I am about to create a test subdomain with #YunoHost to try it out before I make the real switch (from my current Ghost blog to the new, self-hosted one).
Maybe tomorrow I'll share with you the URL of my self-hosted Ghost blog if you want to try things out? 🙈 I have already imported my existing members, I'm ready to go 🚀
And yes, I'm fully aware the timing of my switch (from a Ghost Pro plan to self-hosted) is odd, considering Ghost Pro accounts are now part of the Fediverse. It's just that I couldn't justify spending so much ($31/month) on a free, non-monetized blog that I am capable of self-hosting. It's 6x the cost of my Debian or Ubuntu VPS.
And I kept getting close to the edge of 1000 members, which would have increased my monthly payments. Now I don't have to stress out about getting new readers. From what I understand #ActivityPub followers count as members for Ghost, so someone who gets a sizable following on their federated Ghost site would have to pay more.
I'm sure many people will love this feature (it's fantastic!) but it's not for me. I already have 3 federated Wordpress blogs and too many ActivityPub profiles as it is 🙃
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-17 14:38:06

Today I'm celebrating a personal milestone: 3 MONTHS of #selfhosting thanks to the magic of #YunoHost.
I'm posting a quick message because I need to leave home in 5 minutes to pick up my little one from nursery school. But I didn't want to let this anniversary pass without my acknowledgement.
Thank you @nprofile…gg0f team for changing my life in the best possible way and empowering me to self-host my own #Fediverse instances.
I hope I'll be able to give back one day and help you out on your amazing mission ❤️

2025-03-16 10:18:56

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 89 ✨
Oh #PeerTube, you are making me do mental somersaults as I strategize about the best way to self-host my videos.
This newbie wants to ask: how many VPS’s are too many for someone who has little coding experience and has been self-hosting for just 3 months?
Fedi friends, I’m thinking of signing up for a THIRD VPS 😱
Why?
My current setup:
1️⃣ 5€/month Debian VPS with #YunoHost, where I’m self-hosting #GoToSocial (this account), #Friendica, #Pixelfed, #Fail2Ban and #LinkStack.
2️⃣ 5€/month Ubuntu VPS where I am self-hosting my (upcoming) #Ghost blog (this will make me save a ton, compared to my current Ghost Pro plan).
Back to PeerTube: I could easily upgrade my #Debian VPS and install it there - the costs would be minimal and I would double my RAM and storage. But I am afraid of PeerTube’s consumption when it comes to bandwidth. As in: if I upload a video that for some reason becomes really popular, or if a bad actor decides to DDOS my channel, would that take down all my other self-hosted Fediverse instances? Since they are on the same VPS?
I could limit potential issues by having a dedicated VPS just for PeerTube.
What would you do?
And do you have recommendations for Europe-based VPS’s with affordable plans? (aside from Hostinger) I was thinking of #Hetzner… 
#MySoCalledSudoLife #AskFedi

2025-03-11 14:24:48

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@nprofile…xt5t so happy you could be there to represent Mastodon ❤️
I see that the International Journalism Festival in Perugia has a talk by Emily Liu from Bluesky... and I wonder if we could crowdfund travel expenses for a Mastodon team member to go there and mingle (provided one of you is interested).
It's the most prestigious event in the world of journalism, with star reporters from all over the world...

2025-03-11 09:28:44

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 84 ✨
After spending 24 hours doing Olympic-level mental gymnastics, trying to find a way to self-host my videos NOT on PeerTube (I considered Wordpress's VideoPress, embedding videos from NextCloud, uploading straight to Ghost...) I have capitulated.
Yes I will go with #PeerTube.
Deciding factor: the need to have subtitles (not so easy if you host your own videos).
So yes I will set up my own instance (it would cost as much as donating to an admin... because video hosting/streaming is resource intensive).
Oh dear I will have ANOTHER Fediverse account in addition to Mastodon, GoToSocial, Pixelfed, Friendica, Sharkey, Misskey, Lemmy, MBin and PieFed. I need to sit with this thought for a bit :ItsFine:
Folks, video is HARD (making videos and distributing them, that is)
Edit: SPECIAL THANKS to @nprofile…hhf7 @nprofile…a44y @nprofile…dydt who offered incredible advice (while I was doing my mental gymnastics). I really appreciate your help! 🏆

2025-03-10 20:22:08

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@nprofile…xt5t what a beautiful, powerful poem, WOW!!! if I were you, I'd frame this Andy ❤️

2025-03-10 16:32:17

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Self-hosting follow-up question: has anybody tried to embed a video hosted on #NextCloud in a blog post / web page?

2025-03-05 10:43:57

Good morning Fedi friends!
I was just checking my #Fail2Ban logs and I'm a little taken aback by all the failed login attempts.
Asking the more experienced amongst you if this is normal?
The screenshot is from my Ubuntu VPS (which has been active for less than a month):
total failed: 737;
total banned 142.
By comparison my other VPS (the one with YunoHost on Debian) has the following stats:
total failed: 530;
total banned: 106.
I would definitely beef up my security even more but I don't really understand the security guide on YunoHost. If you have tips for TRUE newbies, I'm all ears :)
https://aseachange.com/fileserver/01ENCW3D083ATDAP5WGJEMSJC8/attachment/original/01JNJXSXX17F5C00ZSJ5FMTRD2.png

2025-03-04 08:42:32

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 77 ✨
This morning I'm attempting a manual install of #Fail2Ban (that is, with commands, no YunoHost) on my #Ubuntu VPS.
I've been greatly enjoying Fail2Ban on my #Debian VPS and I'd like to extend the same protections to the VPS with my self-hosted #Ghost blog.
I hope nothing goes wrong because I have a video call with Stanford students at the study abroad program in Florence at 11am (for a women in cinema class, I'm invited every year)... so I don't wanna feel distracted by tech issues, ha!
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-03-03 10:00:00

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 76 ✨
Monday morning, which means: backing up my #YunoHost setup.
I see that #GoToSocial has an update available but I'm too scared to upgrade it. Having my 4th cup of espresso and working up the courage to do it (I hear it takes a looong time). Hoping I don't break anything 😅
In other news, I am LOVING my #LinkStack and having a glimpse into the links that are the most popular (LinkStack offers you a ranking in reverse order of the most clicked links when you log into their dashboard). Is anyone interested in me writing about it? For reference, here is what the front end looks like: https://elena.social
Off I go update my #GoToSocial, wish me luck!
#MySoCalledSudoLife #FOSS

2025-02-26 16:26:36

If you’re looking for a timeline cleanse / distraction from the news, here is my #LEGO fish market (an original creation by yours truly and my 4-year-old).
I mentioned last week how I was struggling with my self-hosted Ghost installation and the fact I was frequently interrupted by my child to play with #LEGOs. I never got around to sharing the pic, so here it is.
Tomorrow we go back to France and I’m a little sad I cannot take this with us. But it’s in good company with the gorgeous modern house and the Santa’s Visit set (behind it).
Time for me to step away from the keyboard and build more stuff.
Hope you’re having a lovely day ❤️
https://aseachange.com/fileserver/01ENCW3D083ATDAP5WGJEMSJC8/attachment/original/01JN1H9QE3NFDQDVQMDBFKVESD.jpeg

2025-02-19 14:09:37

#AskFedi: do you have any Docker tutorials for total newbies that you would recommend? (Total newbie cannot be emphasized enough, LOL)
My Ghost CLI installation didn't go as planned, so I'm thinking of trying a do-over with Docker.
Alternatively: can you recommend how to wipe the contents of a VPS to start over? I can't uninstall Ghost and I have nothing else on that Ubuntu VPS.
#MySoCalledSudoLife #lesigh #RequestsReekingOfDesperation :FireDumpster:

2025-02-18 08:32:13

This month has been ROUGH.
My child caught the flu (influenza type B) and I spent over a week looking after her round the clock... we even ended up at the pediatric ER.
She had her first "back to normal" day last Thursday and 5 days of perfect health.
Well, I was woken up at 4:00am by her cries... she got sick multiple times, so I spent the rest of the night lying on the hardwood floor (on a blanket at least) with a bucket next to me, ready to sprint into action. Apparently there's a new stomach bug going around that fits her symptoms to a tee (according to a nurse on the phone, from the pediatric ER).
There is some levity, though. A funny / tragic story we will definitely tell her when she's older.
Being anti-processed foods and sodas / only for whole foods can at times be counterproductive. My mother and I were pleading with my 4-year-old at 5am to have a little bit of Coca Cola - without bubbles - to settle her stomach. She screamed she didn't want it and even threw a semi-filled cup of Cola at us.
My mom was like: "but kids love it! Haven't you ever tried it at a kids' party?" I looked at my mom and went: "No, all our friends are also like that" - you know, private school, whole foods, all natural and organic stuff.
I will make sure to tell my little one the Coca Cola story when she is older.
Rough times.
I will be offline most of the day.
Oh and thanks for all your help yesterday with my VPN issues, you rock.

2025-02-17 09:34:36

🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 62 ✨
On the two month anniversary of signing up for my first VPS, I have just purchased a second basic plan: a VPS that runs on Ubuntu so I can self-host Ghost on it.
Later today I will attempt manually installing Ghost with commands - wish me luck!
In case you're wondering why I'm doing this, check my previous messages. TL;DR: Ghost now only officially supports Ubuntu and MySQL, whereas YunoHost runs on Debian, with MariaDB databases. A very generous volunteer at YunoHost has been manually patching Ghost packages to ensure compatibility, but I would rather play it by the book and run a self-hosted Ghost blog on a supported system... especially since they will be federating very soon.
Wish me luck!
#MySoCalledSudoLife
https://aseachange.com/fileserver/01ENCW3D083ATDAP5WGJEMSJC8/attachment/original/01JM9M2J0HFNMHRGD3ADQNWHW3.jpeg

2025-02-16 08:57:28

In the interest of full transparency: I have just severed this account's bridge to #Bluesky.
If you've followed me for a while, you may already know my views of Bluesky. See: the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog) and the fact Bluesky is financed by crypto bros.
I'm really curious to see if this will affect my #GoToSocial backup size. When I bridged to Bluesky, it balloooned from 250MB to 3.3GB... but maybe it was just a coincidence. To be seen tomorrow...

2025-02-16 08:24:43

Crazy thought of the day: maybe I can create my own #Friendica theme – if the skills required are CSS editing?
I used to be a web designer and I'm pretty familiar with these sort of tasks.
I absolutely LOVE Friendica's features but I'm not a big fan of its UX/UI - especially design elements. I'll look into creating my own theme and if it turns out to be a big fail, no biggie, at most I would have lost 2 hours.
I'll keep you all posted 💁‍♀️
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-02-15 15:06:24

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@nprofile…dyep DO IT!!! 😆🤗

2025-02-15 06:23:49

Good morning Fedi friends!
I just spent a week looking after my sick child (we thought she had stomach flu, turns out it was influenza type B). My little one has now fully recovered and we had our second night of real, uninterrupted sleep. So happy!
I thought I’d share something amusing with you. So last night after she fell asleep I finally had some « me time ». What did I do?
I checked my VPS host’s plans page to see how much an upgrade would cost…and then my « self care » / moment of relaxation was browsing #YunoHost’s applications page, daydreaming about what I could I try next.
This is genuinely the stuff that lifts me up. I’m in deep 😅😂
#MySoCalledSudoLife

2025-01-04 16:40:13

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@nprofile…8hjr I look forward to a movie about this. Wow!

2025-01-04 10:44:23

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@nprofile…tqgu Aw bravissimi !!! 👏