@OpinionatedGeek a Northern Ireland instance you say? That would be a horrible idea (/me checks the name of the instance he's posing from)

@d3z I saw your instance name but figured it avoided the awfulness by limiting itself to tech folks.

One of the things I'd miss about Twitter is all the local folks and stories. I thought an NI instance might help bring them over, and also have a nice local 'instance timeline' too. But NI Twitter is often overloaded with politics, and not only am I not interested in that, I don't want the hassle of dealing with other instances and peering when one of the NI users goes too far.

@OpinionatedGeek I wish I had some stories. I need to start thinking about doing something taleworthy.

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z A bit of active moderation should help to avoid the hassles in dealing with other instances.

Sometimes I regret the tech bit, but that wasn't initially intended to be active limitation; just a legacy of coming from the NI Tech Slack.

@OpinionatedGeek I go through periods of thinking that I should just host all my own services. Even write my own and dogfood them. Then it goes back to that lazy and caring enough thing.

@d3z Running VaultWarden has been great - if you need/want a password manager, it's really good and works flawlessly (as far as I can tell) with Bitwarden clients. I run Nextcloud too, and it's handy (but slow on a Pi). Haven't felt the need to run other services (or haven't found good enough services to run). Yet.

@OpinionatedGeek I keep going back to an experiment I thought I’d run at some point where I’d get a group together who would agree on what protocols to use to talk to each other then each member would build their own clients. #too-lazy-dont-care

@OpinionatedGeek VaultWarden is a good shout. I'll have a look at that.

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z If you do go a bit further with setting up an instance, I'm happy to have my brains picked.

(I feel confident in saying that now that zombie season has ended)

@mo @d3z Thanks but it's the whole 'active moderation' thing that's part of the problem:
1. I'm very lazy, and
2. I don't want the whole power/responsibility thing, and
3. As I said, I'm remarkably lazy.

@mo @d3z OK, I'm now contemplating a small instance for a handful of users (half a dozen?). Is it particularly heavy on CPU, disk or network? Shared home server (pi4) vs dedicated cos instance? Any thoughts? Ta.

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z nitech.online is running on a DigitalOcean droplet. Over the last 14 days (when traffic picked up again) it has been using:
- <6% of 1 vCPU
- ~75% of 2GB RAM
- ~10GB of disk space

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z There's been about 10 people active in the last week, 5 people active today.

It definitely needs the 2GB of RAM, IMO. I was trying to do upgrades earlier in the year and the Docker builds were failing with RAM issues on 1GB. That's generally how I've been handling installation, and upgrades (via Docker images).

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z There are dedicated Mastodon hosting providers that might be a better compromise between home server and running a VPS like I'm doing. I tried them out about 4 years ago, but the cost ramped up very quickly for more than a couple of users, but I think it's probably more cost-effective now.

@mo @d3z Thanks for the info! I suppose I think a hosting provider is cheating - it may be the way to do it properly, but I think I'd get a better handle on it all if I put an instance together myself first. (Like email - I've run an IMAP+SMTP server in the past and learned a lot, but I don't want to do that again!)

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z I've done the same with IMAP+SMTP. It really helps to gain an understanding, but it really doesn't do much in the long term.

I kinda cheated cause I'm using the Docker containers. I can't be bothered installing and maintaining all the software from source though.

@mo @d3z Oh I fully intend to cheat with containers too! I do like the way I don't have to worry about build environments and dependencies with them, and that they make (some) network+filesystem requirements explicit. k3s on a Pi has been surprisingly good too, when Docker on Pi started annoying me.

@OpinionatedGeek @mo I'm contemplating a single-user (i.e. me) homegrown (i.e. hacked together) instance. You'll get another follow if it works.

@d3z @mo I feel like putting up a temporary instance to see how it goes, but I don't want to cause a lot of hassle for others setting up peering only for it to be wasted if I trash the instance. Hmm.

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to do 🙂

I think peers will try to communicate with your server for 7 days and then give up. You could could try following people on a few servers for a while and if you're happy with how it's going then do a proper migration from your current account if you're sure you will keep the new server.

@OpinionatedGeek @d3z This is effectively what I did too. I set something up on masto.host first and found that it really didn't suit me. Then I created this one. Used the same domain as well. I don't think it did much damage.

@mo @d3z Excellent - thanks! I shall add this to The List Of Things To Try. And it'll maybe give me cause to revisit The List Of Domains I Pay For But Don't Yet Use.

@mo ahhh ... that's what all those emails are about when someone joins the instance. I need to take my responsibilities a little more seriously.

@d3z There's that too, but also you have SSH access to the box as well.

@mo the key for which will be on my old laptop ... which I'm booting now to check.

@mo Except it isn't because I refreshed that machine when I bought my new one :( Some days I depair for past me.