Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful New Years.

So this year I’m going all in on a set of #open-source, #decentralized social media platforms. My hope is that I’ll adopt one of them to host varied interests that I have without having to interact with FAANG products in a regular basis.

Right now, I have #diaspora, #mastodon, #pixelfed, #peertube and #matrix (Synapse and Element) running on my domain; Several of them are running either as #Docker containers or on VMs, with Matrix on a VPS that is more than I can supply at home currently. So far, the experience has been fairly smooth. Diaspora, Mastodon and Matrix were the most straight forward to setup with Pixelfed being the most difficult. That could be improved with up to date documentation, though. As far as additional platforms go, I’m interesting in taking a look at #lemmy as a decentalized #reddit replacement. There is a slightly larger project I want to tackle though, and that is named migrating my entire setup into a #k8s cluster so I can more easily manage each application, centralize database resources and reduce service overlap. In other words, improve efficiency.

My plan is to post to my pixelfed instance at least once everyday with photos under the #project365 hashtag. I’d like to document the technical aspects of being a social media platform #sysop and better understand how to scale #synapse once I have my #kubernetes cluster up and running.

For #hardware, I’m running a #xeon E3 1245v5 w/64GB of ram and (3) #mdadm #raid 6 arrays. These arrays consist of (1) (8) 3TB drives; (1) (8) 4TB drives and (1) (8) 512GB SSD drives. This gives me a safe amount of storage to be able to rip my bluray media and stream it via #plex to my TV, as well as host large datastores like Elasticsearch, my #nikon #d610 photo archive and #gopro videos that I take while racing.

I’ve also recreated a GPG for the new year. I lost my private key years ago and bungled everything up, so my picture is on the internet in keyservers forever! But I have a new, stronger key that I’ve saved offline properly, and I’ll be leveraging that moving forward. It is currently on the Ubuntu keyservers and Keybase if you want to download the public key.

Keep an eye out for more posts! I’ll be documenting the #k8s journey as much as I can.

-sfunk1x