So, I said I would love to get around to writing about my setup. I've been piecing this site together with that in mind, so here's a short post to ring in the new year!
Turns out, there's not a lot to say. There's a truckload going on, but it's hard to put into words. Behind the scenes, our tiny community is experimenting with a social media platform, a chat platform, and a Single Sign-On solution to tie many of these things together. That process is extremely slow, because we have full-time jobs, families, inflation, Twitter's downfall, and a somewhat dystopian reality that we're all trying to make the best of... and I might be a little over-dramatic. I'm just saying we're all busy, and when we're not busy, we're trying to do something relaxing. Don't be surprised, but we're actually a group of gamers and not infrastructure bloggers. Shh... don't let our secret out!
Assuming this is not the only blog post of the year, I'd really like to get some informative posts up this year! HAProxy is doing some really cool things, and helping others get on the cutting edge and playing with some of those cool things is very high on my to-do list. I've recently had some sleepless nights, so I've been active on the HAProxy forums which has it fresh on my mind.
Of course, Mastodon has grown tremendously in popularity since Musk acquired Twitter. I've been interested in hosting a Mastodon instance for a while, but now others in our little family are also somewhat interested... not many of us are huge Twitter users, but we're curious why everyone else is talking about it. One drawback of Mastodon that we discussed was direct messages and how admins can see them...
Public Service Announcement:
Your direct messages on any social media platform are not private! If you send a message on Facebook, Tiktok, or even Gmail, its transmission is secure, but the hosting site can read them! Mastodon is no exception.
Unfortunately, Mastodon does not yet support disabling this feature (which is what I would like to do), but that doesn't stop us from looking into alternatives that are secure! Enter Rocket.chat! We've not messed with it much, but it supports the Single Sign-On that we're playing with and end-to-end encrypted. Not sure if we'll do anything with this, but we're exploring!
Well, honestly, no clue! A lot of our self-hosted solutions are a bit stale (1) because there are a bunch of them, maybe too many?.. and (2) because things change. For instance, previously we were enjoying our own private WoW server. Now we're playing retail WoW and its latest expansion. Of the 5 Minecraft servers currently running, maybe one of them is getting some use? The holidays seemed to take more time than given back, and that's OK. We will keep having fun when we can. We work hard, but we play harder. Most importantly, we stick together! So, at the start of a brand-new year, let's raise our glasses that we're here together, and we'll figure the rest out as we go! Cheers!