‍fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa @f0x@pixie.town

We gave our docs pages a lick of paint (and a material theme). What do you think?

https://docs.gotosocial.org

ORANGE 🍊

anyone with cashmoney wanna fund gotosocial enough to hire me fulltime? 👀

I want to briefly talk about a problem that I've been seeing pop up a lot over the past couple of years.

It goes something like this: someone sets up a community thing (own project, Mastodon instance, whatever), follows 'DevOps principles', pays for it out of pocket, and then something happens to their income and suddenly there's a massive bill that cannot be paid.

The problem here is that a community is not a company, the budget is extremely finite, and that's something you should be accounting for from the start.

Yes, you might be okay with paying the costs out of pocket, but at some point something *will* go wrong, and you won't be able to afford it, and now your community needs to cough up the costs - and they often won't be able to.

Many of the "modern DevOps" practices exist not because they make things so much better, but because they are extremely profitable on the provider side. Companies can afford this tax; your community cannot.

A brief and non-exhaustive list of such things, some of which are additionally also fragile:
- Nickle-and-dime cloudycloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
- Microservices (including 'serverless')
- Zero-downtime deployments
- Extensive performance monitoring or tracing infrastructure
- Kubernetes and the like

These are all things that you should *avoid* by default. They can very easily inflate your hosting bill by 10x (or more) compared to a bog standard "rent a cheap Linux server/VPS" approach; and none of them are really going to matter for your community project, even those that might have legitimate benefits in other situations.

Your project will almost certain fit on a standard Linux server. It'll cost you <$50 per month instead of $500 per month. Low enough that even if disaster strikes, it's easy to cushion the blow collectively. The availability and performance will be completely fine for a community project.

(Background: I have a decade+ experience in running non-commercial things on a shoestring budget, including high-traffic ones, also advising others on it. I promise you that it is entirely possible if you're careful about where you spend your money.)

I've been struggling with this myself, so I thought I'd repeat it for other people that might be dealing with the same thing:

Not every hobby needs to be a project. Not everything needs to be a whole *thing* with a goal and an endpoint. It's okay to not finish something. It's okay to pick up something for a bit, explore it, start making something, and then drop it without making any "progress".

Productivity is capitalist bullshit that doesn't need to infect your free time too. Have some fun

Hello everyone! We've just created the proper v0.7.0 release of GoToSocial, Stormy Sloth! ⛈️ 🦥

You can find the release here: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases/tag/v0.7.0

This is the culmination of two and a bit months of hard work, and we're really proud of it :)

Big thank you to all contributors, testers, and well wishers!

Release highlights

Basic video support (mp4 only). You can finally upload videos, and view videos from remote instances too. Not all mp4 files work, currently -- this is something we'll investigate for next release most likely.
Support for federating reports in and out of GoToSocial, and viewing reports via the admin settings panel (this feature was sponsored by NLnet).
Support for webp attachments, avatars, and headers.
Users can now create, remove, and view status bookmarks!
Domain blocks now apply on a wildcard basis, so you can block a second level domain (like example.org) and it will apply to subdomains too (like poop.example.org etc).
HTTP request throttling -- only a certain number of http requests are served at a time now. This should vastly improve responsiveness under load on small instances.
Much better logic for pruning old avatars + headers, leading to gb of disk space savings.
So many bug fixes and performance improvements.