2024-08-25 GoToSocial problems

So you're considering self-hosting? You heard good things about GoToSocial? I like it. I use it. This post is about the problems you should be expecting at the moment.

GoToSocial

It's not surprising, after all. This is a very prominent sentence in their README:

GoToSocial is still ~~ALPHA~~ BETA SOFTWARE.

But what are the exact problems? Sometimes ~~alpha~~ beta software is good enough, right?

#Social Media #GoToSocial

Major annoyances

*No post editing**. I hope you can handle your own typos. All you have is "Delete and Redraft". But that orphans all replies, undoes all boosts, forgets all likes and removes posts from bookmarks. "Delete and Redraft" is a sledge hammer. "Edit post" is a delicate quill. And you don't get to have it. YOLO! (You only live once.)

*No filtering**. You can mute and block and all that, but when everybody is posting about Monsterdon, the European Song Contest, the US elections, Caturday or Wordle, you can't filter those hashtags. You must endure the enthusiasm of the people you are following. (I think the developers are implementing things, but it does not seem to have an effect in the front-ends I use, so who knows.)

*Limited federation**. This one is hard to spot. You want to follow this account and that account and it all seems to work until you go back and find that for one account, your follow request seems to hang in limbo, waiting. You cancel, and follow again. It seems to work. Come back later, back in limbo again, waiting. If you check the log, you'll find errors about signatures failing and what not. I have no idea. There are currently 8 open issues containing the word 'signature'. Something is not working and you'll have to have an alt (a separate account) on a different server that doesn't have this issue. That makes me sad. 😥 I also heard that this got fixed with release 0.17? That would be good. 😌

8 open issues containing the word 'signature'

*ActivityPub, keys, and domain names**. Each instance is cryptographically tied to a domain name. Thus, if you are self-hosting, switching server software means that you must use a new subdomain. If you want to migrate your accounts, there must be overlap for account migration to work from one instance to the other. Account migration does not migrate your old statuses. Once you switched off the old instance, there's also no way to delete your old toots. You also cannot get notifications for replies, boosts and mentions of the old account. Plus migration will inevitable miss some instances that where offline while you had both instances running.

Minor annoyances

*No automatic post expiry**. You will have to use a tool like Mastodon Archive or Gomphotherium.

Mastodon Archive

Gomphotherium

No problem

*No front-end**. There is no front-end. I use apps like Toot! on my phone and Semaphore on the web. I don't need anything fancy. And for the non-fancy options, I have mastodon.el for Emacs, toot for the command-line, tuba for Gnome, bitlbee-mastodon for IRC, and so on. There are plenty of options.

The good stuff

*Markdown** in your posts. I like my code blocks.

*Post size** can be increased. I use 5000 characters.

*SQLite** on the server. It's currently 8.4G. The media stuff is 11G.

*Memory footprint**. I use Monit to monitor processes and this process uses 185.6 MB. (It uses a lot more when it starts up as it compiles some web assembly code. If you provide it with a location of where to save the binary blobs, that memory is not required for the next startup.)

*No admin**. I haven't had to run any administration task. Not once. ❤️

*2024-09-14**. @technomancy@hey.hagelb.org wrote about his GoToSocial setup:

So what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different; that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of uptime … It's fine. – in which social media can be put in your own hands

in which social media can be put in your own hands

*2024-10-31**. Remember to do the right thing when upgrading, though:

shut down any monitoring software that might restart GoToSocial if it's down
shut down GoToSocial; make sure it has enough time to shut down calmly
make sure the SQLite database no longer has a hot journal (files other than the actual `.db` file lying around)
make a copy of the database file

Now you're ready to upgrade. Follow along as I try to recover from not thinking this through clearly.

try to recover

*2024-11-27**. @stfn@fosstodon.org writes:

So here I am, with my own Fediverse instance. So far it has been running fine, there are still some things I need to work out, like regular backups. I have nginx logs opened in the background to take a look at them now and then and see if there are any problems happening. In the other pane of tmux I have htop opened to see the resources usage. So far, barring short spikes when someone popular boosts my toots, the load is close to 0.0, and RAM usage is around 400-500MB. -- How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse

How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse