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Adventures in Webmastery

NOTE: I have subsequently taken down my Librarian instance, as it is non-functional and there are, in fact, other instances out there. Sorry for any inconvenience.

As you can see, I have a shiny new website and gemini capsule here. If you have somehow figured out who I am, you may be wondering "Why the hell do they need another one?". Well, to tell you the truth, I don't. However, my first site was difficult to maintain, my second was a bit boring, and my old gemini capsule is at maximum capacity thanks to all the images I've been storing on it. I also wanted something a bit smaller and snappier, so I went all out.

I started by making a new account for sourcehut, under a new username. I had heard that you could use sourcehut pages to host both websites and gemini capsules, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I then bought a domain from Namecheap, added it to deSEC, and coding away I went. I actually got so into the coding that I forgot to eat yesterday, which hasn't happened before.

But what's a queer, lefty, FOSS-loving retro blog without services? For the past couple of days, I have been fighting with DigitalOcean to get a couple of useful web apps hosted; and my desire to do this goes back even further. You see, despite the three services (SearXNG, Miniflux, and Librarian) already being available eleswhere on the net, I have found too many minor annoyances with those instances.

SearXNG instances (and search engines in general) always have at least one of four issues: bad indexes, ugly/white-only themes, frequent breakage, or privacy concerns. By self-hosting a metasearch engine, I can pick and choose which indexes to use, make it default to dark mode, fix it as soon as I notice anything awry, and I know for a fact that I am not tracking myself (or any users), and I'm pretty sure I can trust my VPS. Initially, I planned to host 4get; but that plan fell apart quickly when server maintenance became slightly too difficult and I just went and installed Yunohost.

Librarian is a different story entirely. At the moment, I only know of one other Librarian instance, which is hosted by Project Segfault. Now, Project Segfault do a pretty good job with all of their services, but I have had some issues in the past, and the existence of only one instance is bad news if something were to happen to it. I rarely watch videos on LBRY (the reasons for this could probably have an article of their own), but I wouldn't use the protocol at all if my only option was Odysee.

Miniflux is similar. Although there are probably hundreds of FreshRSS, TT-RSS, and Miniflux instances out there, barely any have open signups and the few that do often have issues with the frequency at which they fetch new articles. It will certainly be handy to be able to read the news in one place on all devices, instead of just on my phone.

There are a few other services I'd like to host: Invidious, Nitter, redlib, Terraforming Mars, Tootik; but either these didn't work, required more resources than I'm currently paying for, or weren't available on Yunohost in the first place. There's always time, though.

I don't write a lot, so I have no idea how to end this. See ya!

Posted 9th July 2024

Edited 10th July 2024