Social Gibiris is back online. \o/

It has been a while.

Back in 2015, I set up a GNU Social instance on an AWS server, accessible at the address social.gibiris.org, very much to learn about both. Because GNU Social was software for federated microblogging, I hooked up with a lot of like-minded people from all around the world, and from whom I learned a lot about self-hosting of services and the fediverse.

AWS was expensive, though, so in 2019 (I think – it's been a loooooong 3 years), I attempted to move the service onto the server I maintain at home. It didn't work; I don't know why.

I focussed on other things in the meantime, and was totally unprepared when that offensively-rich man-child impulsively bought twitter (to prove an unprovable, false assumption).

In the last few days I tried to set up a Mastodon instance at home, but the documentation for someone like me (knowledgeable, but no expert) was just plain awful. It makes assumptions about your understanding of the tech and of how Mastodon works, and more assumptions about your working environment and the size of your intended user-base. In my case, all of these assumptions were wrong, so after a couple of days on-and-off trying to get it to work, I gave up.

But … because Mastodon federates using the ActivityPub protocol, I had a look around at what else I could use. Pleroma and Friendica both presented themselves to me. I decided to give Friendica a go, and while I had to do a few things differently from what the documentation suggests, it's working fine for me so far.

It is very possible that Social Gibiris will fall apart, but I'm happy with how it's going so far.

Registration is open-ish. The service will only be for family and close friends, but because it's federated, I and its other users can be reached from other ActivityPub-supporting systems.

I can be contacted at @eibhear@social.gibiris.org.

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