asty.org: The homepage of Chris Allegretta vΩ

Still loving OVHCloud for my dedicated server hosting, and floating IPs make it so much easier.

2026-01-31T14:55:00-05:00

Ok I think I need to focus more on smaller scale articles. I'm psyching myself out thinking of all the things I should add to an article, and should focus on what I need to add.

My hosting history with OVH

Here's the current situation: I use ovhcloud.com to run Proxmox that I control entirely myself (i.e. a 'bare metal' server). On that host, I run Linux virtual machines for various services (Nextcloud, git repos, and this very blog just to name a few!) and they have just been rock solid for years now.

I recently decided I wanted more disk speed, and again found out that it's just helpful to peruse the offerings at least every once in awhile. While I ended up with about half the total storage (that I wasn't using anyway) I was able to move up to NVMe storage and double the RAM for the same price I was already paying before, in the same datacenter! How nice is that.

I've considered other providers and often peruse lowendtalk.com discussions, but the OVH eco line is just very difficult to beat dollar for dollar, and I have had 0 problems with my VMs having unexpected downtime. I've certainly caused my own downtime but that's another story. But seriously, where else can you get a reliable server with 32GB of RAM for $20 a month? Their pricing is just insane.

And the management tools are really great. I think on the lowest tier boxes (Kimsufi) there have occasionally been issues with the IPMI KVM, but I have since graduated to SyS and Rise-class machines; still very reasonable for what they provide.

Floating IPs make intra-datacenter VM moves trivial

While moving ~10 VMs to a new host could be rather daunting, using Proxmox as the virtualization OS makes this at least easier by making the process of adding a temporary location (i.e. the hard drive on the new server) very simple.

But OVH makes it even easier, as moving the IPs I have assigned from one host to another (assuming they are in the same data center of course) a matter of clicks. This is such a stress reliever; you say you want to 'move additional IP', and within a minute or two it's on the new host - because they are tied to a virtual MAC address, all you have to do is restore the VM image from backup and boot it up, and it is up and running with the same IP address. So nice.

If folks have other recommendations about their provider and making moving VM images around easy, let me know via the Fediverse (@chrisa@asty.org) or Bluesky (@asty.org).

[as always, no compensation was provided for this article, and no approval or editing was granted. I really need to add a template for this to all my articles]

I'm between articles right now, but here's what I'm thinking about (spoilers, it's bad smartphones)

2025-09-27T23:21:41-04:00

Hello. I see now the pattern I have been falling into a lot on this blog: being someone who does not run this website to support myself full time, I tend to write about things as I find I am passionate about them. I get started on an article about something on that topic, but my article doesn't feel like it's really complete, and I stall, rather than start on something else.

Currently the issue (as is often the case) is smartphones. I've already discussed how I absolutely hate the current state of smartphones in the US, and it seems things are just getting worse and worse.

I'm working on a few different angles for dealing with this situation. We need more De-Googled phones. We also need to go back to the days of user flexibility and repairability: 3.5mm headphone jacks, SD card expansion, and even replaceable batteries, or at least some combination of these. The EU has already weighed in on battery repairability and I'm excited to feel the knock-on effects of these rules (hopefully) in 2027. Sucks that we have to wait until then (and maybe even longer) in the US, but at least some governments are actually leading right now.

Finally, at least I think phones need to go back to being reasonably sized. Or at least have the option for it even if not every model is say under 73mm wide and 160mm tall. I have hurt my hand several times just trying to hold a "modern" (AKA stupidly large) phone without dropping it, and I am so done with them.

And don't tell me that markets chose bulky, featureless slab phones. Markets are, in fact, easily manipulable, especially by the oligopolies we find ourselves stuck with, and manipulating they have been. And I'm so tired of it.

I'm honestly tired of Big Tech also. I don't believe in the tradeoff of living for 'free' online, and not being allowed to have any expectation of privacy in return. I was a good little customer of YouTube Premium for my family, and look what that got me.

The only winning move is not to play. So I have several phones coming my way from companies which care more about repairability, instead of planned obsolescence. And even a few with screens that might actually fit into most pockets comfortably. One of them is even Google-free out of the box, but sports an alternate cloud backup, which by the way is completely optional. How do you like them apples?

Honestly the bar is so low that basically any company not making these cookie cutter tablets-in-phone's-clothing is a potential winner to me at this point. But it would be nice to have more than just the bare minimum.

I had an article relatively ready to put up, but I want more devices to add, to give potential readers more choices. After all, choice is what I want, so why not give it to other folks. So just hold tight, more is on the way.

GrayJay is a fantastic option for YouTube and Twitch viewing on desktop and mobile.

2025-09-12T23:32:21-04:00

Recent GrayJay builds have been pretty solid on desktop, but the Android version had been quite stable and functional for many months now. And it supports a ton of additional video platforms, all in one app. Especially with YouTube's recent crackdown on family accounts of all things, it may be time to give GrayJay a look, especially on mobile.

A quick reminder that the GrayJay app, while still technically alpha software, has been incredibly stable for me for many months now on Android. The desktop version (at least on Linux) has fully replaced using YouTube in a browser for me, and I even use it occasionally for Twitch as well. I only wish there were a Google, err Android TV version.

Since YouTube first raised its pricing for the family version of YouTube Premium a few years ago, I've been waiting to see if they actually gave us a better product in return. It seems that the answer is not only no, but also they are now going to crack down on 'sharing'. of the YouTube Premium Family Plan. You read that right. Sharing. On a family plan, the thing designed to be used by multiple people. I have two kids in college who live in another state. How exactly does that violate the spirit of what a family plan means exactly, YouTube?

Is my mobile provider going to tell me that my kids can't live somewhere else and use their phone, because they are on my family plan? I'd ditch them in less than 24 hours. Is my bank going to tell me that? Same thing. This is some medical-insurance-denial-letter level of corporate thinking, and I am not going to stand for it anymore.

And with GrayJay I don't have to. And I wont have to watch ads either. Like other open source apps like NewPipe, I can watch videos without ads, and even better, download videos that I watch more than once. This has the benefit of taking the awful burden of having to provide and run a video service off of poor little YouTube, who I would remind you is charging more and money just for the privilege of watching other people's content.

Further, having all your creators across the many platforms Grayjay supports in just one app is just incredibly convenient. It supports services I'd have not even thought of being able to have all in one place, like Patreon. It even supports the Fediverse's version of video sharing, PeerTube, something I really wish folks would put the time into understanding, if you really believe in freedom of information, and not just ingesting corporate-approved media.

Why might you not want to switch full to GrayJay?

One big reason people might want to consider staying on the full YouTube and Twitch browser sites is commenting and tipping creators. I like doing this, and occasionally I do still open the full website to post a comment here or there, report obvious scams that YouTube is incapable of detecting on their own somehow, and so forth.

Also, if you are one of those people who wants to use as much open source software as possible, it has been posited that GrayJay is not truly Open Source software. While I agree with this assessment, it is still source-available, and I'm going out on a limb that the FUTO group is going to inevitably have to deal with more than a few lawsuits on their hands over this software. So at the end of the day, I really do not mind giving them a few bucks. And the proof is in the pudding, I use this app on many computers and mobile devices, it's definitely worth the $10 they ask for in return.

I have not been able to get previews on videos when scrubbing forward or back while holding the time marker, so that's a bummer, but it's not something I do all the time. Remember this is alpha software.

Finally, because Youtube is constantly trying to play a game with cat and mouse with ad-blockers, occasionally a video stream will crash and need to be reloaded. This is a small price to pay for the benefits of GrayJay in my opinion.

And if someone is going to write some defence of a multi-billion dollar company which couldn't possibly get by without that ad revenue, my answer is: tell YouTube to stop altering the deal, if you don't want people to think you're Darth Vader. YouTube isn't YTTV, there are no extra licensing fees piling up every year, and the vast majority of people I know have cut the cord specifically because of this escalating licensing fee nonsense. I would not have expected that Youtube itself would be next, but here we are.

Maybe YouTube will finally put the clamps on and actually restrict alternate clients, so I'll need to go actually use some alternative streaming services, like the excellent Nebula, or LMG's Floatplane. Or actually read a book for the first time in years? I guess we'll see.

Starless Abyss: The roguelite spaceship deckbuilder I've wanted for years

2025-09-07T03:20:25-04:00

If you're a fan of deckbuilders and space battlers, this one's a must-try!

Quick Facts
Publisher: No More Robots
Platform(s): Steam
Controller support (A-F): B+. A little analog stick-as-mouse cursor movement needed. But overall, good snapping to selections via the d-pad in menus, and during battle.
Cost (at time of review): $14

It feels like a decade since I first fell in love with the roguelite genre via the gateway drug that was FTL. I I think it's actually been longer. But it does seem like I've been waiting an eternity for a new roguelite which, even if not a full successor to FTL, at least brought me that same initial spark of excitement to play, and re-play.

One recent example which caught some attention was Void War - which, while I did like what I saw, I felt was just a little too close to FTL. Another is the very cute and funny Cobalt Core. A great deckbuilder and spaceship battler in its own right, I still highly recommend and love that game, but honestly I haven't gotten back into it after beating it a couple times.

Instead I have found a great spaceship deckbuilder with a little dice action for good measure that I'd like to tell you about, namely Starless Abyss.

Sample Starless Abyss early-run battle

Premise, Basics, and Gameplay

The premise is simple: You are one of several selectable proximae (some kind of consciousness, human or otherwise), defending the universe against demons from another dimension which have appeared to try and ruin your fancy lunch picnic. Or just consume all our souls, whichever.

Combat is turn-based, and like many deckbuilders, your ship(s) have a limited amount of energy which you can spend on cards with different costs. You draw a certain number of cards from your draw pile, each with its own energy cost (green circled number). Some cards exhaust for that battle once they are played, most go to the discard pile, shuffle, repeat. You know the drill.

In combat, you move your ship(s) around the hexagonal grid and fight against the various demonic space-horrors. Your various attack cards cause different type of damage, debuffs, and have different range limits, often forcing you to reposition your ship at the start of your turn to be in range to attack the enemy. And of course you have your defensive cards to bump up your shields, or utility cards, which let you do things like teleport to another part of the battlefield.

Hmm.....a......boss?

When your turn ends, the enemies get their turn, and there are often a lot of enemies not visible at the start of the game who will spawn in to complicate things further. Defeat them all, or just the boss at the end of the level, to move on.

I say ship(s) above, because your default proxima pilot actually commands 3 ships and individually they feel a little underwhelming, though some cards cause some nice multi-ship bonus effects. This is still really not my sort of thing though, and I much prefer one ship to manage. But take heart, there is a cool brain-in-jar proxima you get access to very early on, who has a nice beefy spaceship to compensate(?) for being 'only' one combat vehicle.

Yes! Give me a brain-in-jar protagonist in my spaceship battler all day.

One other thing I should mention early on is the Heat mechanic, whereby playing attack cards will cause your ship to heat up by a certain amount (red triangle icon on the card). When your ship overheats, it cannot attack further until you either use a card which removes heat, or at the end of your turn, your ship will automatically drop its heat level by a set amount. I honestly don't love this mechanic. The default 3 ship arrangement runs into this a lot, where each ship basically only attacks once or twice before overheating, forcing you to pick a different ship to attack from. Again, not my favorite idea, and it honestly feels a bit superfluous, but there's a lot more to like here.

The graphics are a wonderful mix of pixely retro-style, and the enermies appear not as other ships a la FTL, but as Lovecraftian pixel art monsters. The low-res pixel style is very pleasing to me as someone who grew up with the NES, but it may not be for everyone. There are also a lot of low-res-and-frame-count loop animations that function as as transitions between encounters, which helps set a surreal sci-fi atomosphere. There is a part of me that wishes the adversaries were just ships, and not distrubing creatures that explode into viscera, but we can't always have everything.

In classic deckbuilder style, in battle you have your turn, spend energy to play the cards; some cards do damage, some build up your ships' shields, and some have utility like putting down offensive or defensive mines, or let your ship teleport around the grid.

Great Quality of Life Improvements

What sets this game apart is the amount of nice quality of life improvements it brings to the table, especially around RNG. One of my favorite things is the D.I.C.E. system.

Over the course of the game you pick up dice of random values (1-6 naturally). You use these to affect the outcome of the random (non-battle) encounters you'd experience in roguelikes. But rather than just being locked into a set of choices based on your perks, with either set outcomes or an arbitrary percent changes of success, you can instead spend one of your D.I.C.E. (as long as it's over the requirement minimum) to push the chance your action suceeds from 25% to 100%. I really like this mechanism. You wont always have the dice to succeed at every encounter, but it's enough to get the outcomes you really want.

[Update: I didn't even realize it, but in the card reward screen, you can even spend one of your D.I.C.E. to re-roll. This is great, because many deckbuilders instead make you spend currency, which is often very scarce, to do this. I like using D.I.C.E. for this instead for flexibility and not making your coins feel like actual gold, that you never want to spend in the run.]

Dice are a nice improvement on the random encounter formula

You might read these descriptions, and think 'jeez, multiple ships to manage each turn, deck building, heat mechanic, dice mechanic, this is too much!'. It could come off that way at first, but trust me as you play the game it does not feel overwhelming. And the game does a good job of displaying the relevant info about your ships, even with a dozen enemies on the screen at the same time.

Other QoL improvements that I love: the Store has pretty much everything you'd need; I would honestly say it is even better than in something like Slay The Spire. You've got a subscreen to buy new cards, and another to either upgrade or remove a card. You can even do an upgrade/remove more than once per visit, if you have enough credits to do so (first time is costs 75 credits, the second 100, etc...). You can also buy an assortment of ship perks (artifacts), and you can even pick up a totally new ship if you don't like your current one, or if it's suffered a lot of damage in battle. This is a pricey thing to do, but it can definitely be worth it. Overall it's a joy to visit the store.

A perfect store experience!

I never said it was perfect...

This game is not without its issues though. I will say I've not experienced anything game-breaking so far. But I have seen the occasional issue, and there's some things I think could be improved.

I have experienced one issue where after selecting the next destination, the game simply went into an animation that just looped endlessly, causing a soft lock. But happily I was able to save and restart right from there again.

I've also had more than a few runs where I hit 2 stores in a row. This is normal with random path generation, but it feels a little more frequent than I would have expected, with the number of hours I've clocked in so far.

Finally, one suggested improvement: It would be so nice to be able to switch tabs/screens in the Store using the LB+RB buttons. This is a pretty standard practice, and as far as I know those buttons have no other function in the store.

Victory.....for now.

Final word

Overall I really adore this game. Even though I generally prefer to only have to manage one ship, there is a lot of additional flexibility offered by the other proxima, and I haven't even unlocked all the characters.

Honestly this is a game that is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum is also impressive, especially for under $20. If you like spaceship deckbuilders, especially one of the games I mentioned in the intro, I think you might really enjoy Starless Abyss.

New post! My site is now built on Publii

2025-09-02T14:54:07-04:00

This is a new post to test what's going with exporting from my old WP site.

Exciting, isnt it?

Actually it is! I am now just running Publii and backing up my working directory to Nextcloud, so I always have a backup, then publishing to the website.

I hope this means there will be more frequent updates now.

Personal updates: I have survived being excised from Google. I have three wonderful children and 2 stepchildren who are fantastic. Life is definitely good when you step really, really far back and look at things in aggregate.

Rescuing Chromebooks from Google with Void Linux

2025-08-07T04:49:05-04:00

Just some more notes from my experiments with Void Linux, particularly on a converted Chromebook.

I have to first shout out as always the incredible work done by MrChromebox, as installing custom firmware onto your Chromebook to install Linux is the ultimate improvement you can make to your severely restricted device. In order do install it, you will have to disable the write protect on your device.

On modern Chromebooks, this is usually as easy as opening the device and disconnecting the battery, then connecting wall power and running the script in Developer Mode. As always, check compatibility with your device before trying to install the firmware.

Installing Void Linux is about as easy on a 'liberated' Chromebook as it is on a normal x86-64 device, but here are some additional notes for things you will have to likely install for everything to feel as good as possible:

[Also, for those already asking yourself 'Why not Arch?', in this case, the Chromebook I installed on actually did not recognize the MMC block device that the laptop uses for storage out of the box. I am always happy to get more experience using Void Linux when possible and have Arch on other boxes. Void really feels like an unique and kind of an underdog distro, whereas Arch gets all the adulation.]

Fixing Audio

Yes! Previously this was a real PIA to get working, but is actually relatively straightforward nowadays, using the WeirdTreeThing scripts. Just download and run ./setup-audio - you'll need python installed, but it probably will already be installed by default.

As a note, these scripts seem to work best on rolling distributions like Void and Arch, because they assume the newest packages and paths for the audio drivers.

Ectool for keyboard backlight

This was a little more difficult on Void, but can be done. The ectool program is an adaptation of the ChromeOS tools, and requires a few steps to get setup (bug me if I left something out here):

sudo xbps-install cmake libusb-devel libftdi1-devel pkg-config cmake -DCMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5 make

Then copy src/ectool somewhere useful like /usr/local/bin and you're ready to use it. EDIT: It looks like you must set the binary setuid:

chmod +s /usr/local/bin/ectool

I made the following silly little scripts I called kbup and kbdown, Ill put them here for you to look over if you'd rather set them up differently:
(Content warning: lazy bash scripting)

kbup:

#!/bin/bash ECTOOL=/usr/local/bin/ectool PCT=$(${ECTOOL} pwmgetkblight | awk 'END { print $NF }') if [ ${PCT} -ge 100 ]; then echo "Already at max..`" exit 0 fi let PCT=${PCT}+20 ${ECTOOL} pwmsetkblight ${PCT}

and kbdown:

#!/bin/bash ECTOOL=/usr/local/bin/ectool PCT=$(${ECTOOL} pwmgetkblight | awk 'END { print $NF }') if [ ${PCT} -le 0 ]; then echo "Already at min..." exit 0 fi let PCT=${PCT}-20 ${ECTOOL} pwmsetkblight ${PCT}

Could this just be one program? Yes! Doing this is left an an exercise to the reader.

From here it's just a matter of assigning kbup and kbdown to your preferred keystrokes. In XFCE this is under Settings > Keyboard and click on Application Settings menu to add the entries. Since the brightness up and down keys seem not to be bind-able, I just set mine to be bound to Alt+9 and Alt+0, but do what feels good to you.

For certain devices, disabling Synaptics touchpad config in X11 is necessary

On my Galaxy Chromebook 2 at least, I had to actually disable the Synaptics drive, as it rendered the touchpad mostly insensitive to light taps and clicks. This is as easy as:

cd /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ rm 70-synaptics.conf ln -sf /dev/null 70-synaptics.conf

and restarting. You may then need to turn up the touchpad sensitivity to get a good experience, but at least the touchpad is not putting its fingers in its ears when you're trying to move the mouse pointer.

That's all for now!

Snippets: Netbird runit script setup for Void Linux

2025-05-29T00:54:56-04:00

Just going to throw some stuff online for my own recollection, since I keep needing to create these files:
Void Linux Netbird init script for runit on Void Linux:

Basic setup and init script:

mkdir -p /etc/sv/netbird
cat </etc/sv/netbird/run
#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
[ -r conf ] && . ./conf
exec /usr/bin/netbird service run --config /etc/netbird/config.json --log-level info --daemon-addr unix:///var/run/netbird.sock --log-file /var/log/netbird/client.log
END

And of course for post-install:

chmod +x /etc/sv/netbird/run
ln -sf /etc/sv/netbird /var/service/netbird

I've not yet better integrated this into logging, but will edit this post if I do so.

(Almost All) Smartphones Just Plain Suck Now

2025-05-12T01:08:46-04:00

Just a quick rant. This may be obvious to many folks, but wow, smartphones are so boring and awful (user-hostile) nowadays. They somehow find a way to get even worse. every. single. year.

Every phone release now is just a ever-increasing slab which looks just like all the other slabs. You get your iPhones and you get your Android phones, and that's it. No company takes any risks at all, they just keep axing features (MicroSD, 3.5mm, replaceable battery, IR blaster, hw keyboard). And they're increasingly locked down and controlled, so Apple and Google can spy on everything you do, and you just have to trust them to not leak too much sensitive info about you to their advertisers when they sell your data, which they absolutely are doing, and you can't stop it. Apple literally listened to iPhone users' microphone data and send it to third parties not under their oversight. Seriously, those links I put here about the most recent privacy violations are stories less than 24 hours old.

How did things get this awful....and on top of that why must every phone release be absolutely gigantic now? 6.7 inch screens as the minimum? What the hell happened here?

I'm leaving out one category in the above, namely ultra-minimal phones with either large T9 keypads, or just heavily restricted functionality, like the Light Phone series. I'm sure they're great, but I do still want something that functions primarily as a smartphone, and I want more buttons and features, not fewer.

There are a ever-decreasing number of exceptions in terms of interesting non-hostile devices which are still actually smartphones:

HMD has the Skyline and Fusion which allow some basic repairability, yet still has some basic ingress protection. Both have an SD card slot, and the lower-cost Fusion even has a headphone jack! And no one ever talks about these phones for more than 5 minutes. I'm going to have to get one and see if the camera is really the dealbreaker I've heard about in the very, very limited coverage they got. Unfortunately are also way too big

There's the new Minimal phone. Something actually unique, sporting an actual hardware QWERTY keyboard in 2025, an e-ink screen, and even an SD card slot. It was recently reviewed by the always great Mr Mobile.

And that's kinda it IMO, except for maybe some phones aimed at mainly the Chinese market with insane battery life, sometimes something exotic like an infrared camera, from brands like UMIDIGI and DOOGEE. Honestly I don't really trust these phones with my personal data anymore, nor that they'll ever get security updates.

At this point I'm really only interested in something I can eventually put a privacy respecting OS like /e/OS on, but I'm willing to wait a few generations to do this. But a lot of these vendors have no interest in allowing non-stock Android forks to be flashed onto their phones, yet don't want to actually deliver meaningful security updates with any reliability. Why do we always have to be in the worst timeline...

But as someone who values size above all (seriously - how do people not injure their fingers using these things one-handed?), the last phone I plan to review is the last remaining option I'm aware of for non-insanely-large phones from a major brand, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo. It's basically the Thinkphone 25 without the carbon fiber look. The TP25 didn't even come to the US this year, because Moto is apparently so afraid that people will literally throw up on their phones if they don't ship with 8" screens.

Maybe I will try one of these few remaining options, even though they are filled with the Google spy ecosystem which cannot be avoided. Maybe the DOJ will get its way and break up Google and I wont need to constantly stress about how even the OS landscape gets more boring and restricted, and we lose more rights every year. I guess we'll see.

2025 Fediverse update: GotoSocial server and the Phanpy web client are great!

2025-01-02T10:58:00-05:00

Ok time for some updates. So I have been putting off maintenance of my personal Mastodon instance, and instead relying on another server for my main account, which just feels wrong for a decentralized social network. I'll need to write up a separate article about my struggles with

So I started to look around for a server that's a little more lightweight management-wise, as I just host myself (and a few bots), and after some search I found GotoSocial. GotoSocial (abbreviated GTS) is much like Mastodon in that it is also a Federated Activitypub server implementation, and thus compatible with Mastodon servers, but has much smaller resource requirements. It can run on a single board computer with 1GB of RAM, and does not even need its own database - it can be configured to use a SQLite flat file for all its storage!

There is fantastic documentation about getting GTS up and running, but the basic steps are:

Download the most recent binary release (or compile it if you want)

Extract to a directory

Create the gotosocial user (or whatever you like)

Edit the (very well documented) config.yaml - most defaults are good

Add a config to Apache/Nginx for the server (hardest part)

Add your first user account

Pick and install a frontend** (web, mobile or what have you), log in and start enjoying!

A fantastic server, but no default web front-end

Ok, the last bullet is definitely unique to GotoSocial, and something you need to get used to: there is no built-in web client. You have to find something something you like and set that up. But this is Open Source software! You don't need to use the default Mastodon web interface, even if you are on a Mastodon server!

The GotoSocial web server does host a useful page at /settings where you can log into the server, set up your profile information, set your default post privacy (why would you set up a social network for yourself and not make your default post privacy as public? The default indeed is private) and do any pending administrative tasks, e.g. blocking any unruly peer domains.

Anyway, if you haven't investigated Fediverse clients yet and just use the default, you definitely should! Here is a great page listing several clients which work very well with both Mastodon and GotoSocial. I highly recommend checking some of the web frontends out, as they often have publicly hosted instances that you can just log into your own home instance to try it out, before you decide whether to install it on your web server. The web client I've enjoyed using the most so far has to be Phanpy.

The Phanpy web client

Phanpy describes itself as an opinionated fediverse client. Well whatever they are doing, I love it. The interface is super slick, uses dark mode by default, and has very customizable columns.

I really cannot say enough good things about this client. There are a few bugs and limitations, but I believe they are both specific to GTS and to my server , as I've tried to re-use the same name for several different instances. The main issues I've encountered is that setting up a column to follow hashtags doesn't work on my local server, nor if I pick the federated timeline. Hence in the picture below, you'll see my columns are set to search for hashtags on the mastodon.world instance. But this also speaks to how good Phanpy is that they allow you to do this so easily! And you can edit them after the fact, re-order them, etc, it's great.

Non-web clients (Android, iOS, etc)

Obviously Android clients like Tusky or the regular ol' Mastodon app works well with GotoSocial, and I assume the vaunted Ivory client on iOS works with GTS as well. If you have tried Ivory with a GTS instance and have a report on its compatibility, please do let me know!

General Fediverse anxiety - its weakness is absolutely also a strength

I'll probably write up a dedicated post about this, but again at least as far as my first implementation has gone, discoverability still hurts many Fediverse implementations. Trending hashtags looks fairly solid, but I think the best way to make Mastodon and GTS a useful experience is to go out and actively search out hashtags, and do not expect to be fed suggested posts or profiles to follow.

If there's one thing that bugs me about the new rising star of social media, namely Bluesky, its that you really have to go out of your way to stop seeing certain things that get really repetitive. After seeing the hundredth anti-Trump/Elon/Tesla post in a day that, regardless of how I feel about these things, I just got frustrated and had to set up keyword blocks just to try and see more varied posts. But because so much of social media is pictures and memes, and so many people constantly re-post the same stuff, often with the super intellectual content of "THIS! 💯" as their entire message, you still end up seeing it anyway.

I do still think the Fediverse is the best option for folks who want to dip into social media and want lots of flexibility, and are willing to seek out topics without having the experience take over their lives. The fact that you can run your own server and get to back up your data, not to mention moving instances fairly easily is really a great bonus, but I don't know how many people care these days about it, unfortunate though it is.

The IPs they are a changin'

2024-12-20T02:59:26-05:00

Just a quick note that the IPs for asty.org and associated systems will be changing, as I'm finally moving my OVH Proxmox setup to the good old US of A, after my system in Canada dutifully performed excellently. Again I highly recommend them for anyone looking for self-hosting of any non-trivial services.

Personally I haven't had as much time to write as I've been contracting, and it's important to be able to justify all the work you're doing when you present those invoices. But I'm hoping to find something permanent in systems administration or analysis. Keep in touch if you want more updates, I'm not the kind of person to vomit up details on social media so people can passively learn stuff without actually talking to me. Except on my website since I get some ad revenue for it.