My GoToSocial instance is now one year old
I don’t remember the exact date when my GoToSocial instance was launched, but I am quite sure it was somewhere around late November of 2024. Which means that my very own server in the Fediverse is one year old. And on that occasion I would like to do some sort of an introspection of where I am and how did I reach this point.
Origins
The idea to host my own instance in the Fediverse came to me for the first time when the admin of the late botsin.space server announced that he will be closing the server due to lack of time. Botsin.space was an instance dedicated to running bots, and there I was hosting my first Fediverse bot, the Astrobin Image of the Day.
The admin was nice to inform about the closure well in advance, so I had some time to check my options. From the ones available, GoToSocial seemed the easiest to deploy, and most stable to run, with a good and active development process. So I went this route.
I am used to self hosting services, so for my the whole setup process was a breeze. For the instance, I rented a new VPS from RackNerd, the provider I was using at the time.
Once the instance was up and running, I also configured backups using Borg, and monitoring using Prometheus.
I won’t be diving into the details of configuration here, because I already wrote about those topics in depth in previous posts:
How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse
Administrating my GoToSocial instance - monitoring and backup
Migrations
Time went by, and my instance was humming long quietly, hosting my bot and not doing much else. I had a “personal” account there with the obvious name of stfn, but I was not using it because I already had other such accounts elsewhere.
And then came the series of controversies with Fosstodon, the instance where I had my main account then. Tired of being on such an instance, I decided it’s time to my stuff somewhere else, and there was an abvious choice where that “somewhere else” could be.
The ability to move accounts between instances together with followers and other lists is an awesome part of the Fediverse, and this was another time when it came handy.
I moved my main account to my instance, and it’s still there, you can find me at fedi.stfn.pl/@stfn
Around that time I also decided I don’t want to rent VPSes and store my data in the US, because, well, let’s just say I do not trust that country when it comes to privacy and my rights as a consumer. Also I prefer to spend my money within the EU, where it benefits both me and my neighbours.
That is why I decided to move my instance from RackNerd’s VPS to Hetzner in Germany. That was much more involved and stressful than moving accounts between instances, but turned out fine in the end.
I wrote about this period of hosting my instance in the blog post:
Migrating servers, leaving Fosstodon, moving to my own GoToSocial
The more the merrier
One of the great things about GoToSocial is its API, allowing to send toots in basically a single HTTP POST call with an auth token. And as it is my own instance, I can do with it whatever I want and not be concerned with using up someone’s else resources. And so my little herd of bots started growing and now consists of:
Astrobin Image of the Day - showing the Image of the Day on a astrophotography sharing site
Stacja Dnia - showing each day a random railway station in Poland
Dzień - statistics about the length of the day and night in the geographic center of Poland
Nasz Papa - A bot to remind us of the great Pope John Paul II, and his great input in the Polish meme culture
Also two of my real life friends were kind enough to join me on my instance, and I am very happy to offer them my services:
Current times
And so here we are today. My instance is still running strong, having survived multiple GTS updates with database migrations. Every night a Borg backup is being done, and before every update of the GTS app, or the server software, I stop the server and do a snapshot in case something goes wrong.
The instance is running, along with my blog and some other minor services, on a Hetzner CX33 VPS with four vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. It’s 80GB disk in around 70% full, RAM usage is 30%, and the load rarely goes over 1, usually when I publish a link to a new blog post on my fedi account, and all the other servers try to pull the preview.
During this year I’ve learnt a lof about managing software and servers along the way, and I am sure most of the things I do could be done much better. But hey, not everything at once. Rome was not built in a day (and then came the Nero Burning Rom).
Future plans
I don’t have any specific plans for the future. It would be great if more of my friends would like to join me on it. I think that around 10 accounts of fleshy people would be the reasonable maximum of what I am willing to handle.
Looking at Prometheus, the disk storage seems to be the first metric to run out, so I might consider offloading the media to object storage, which will be an interesting challenge on its own. I would also like to add more automation and configuration tools to the tech stack like Opentofu. But those are plans for the future. For now, my instance in the Fediverse has its first anniversary and I hope there will be much more to come.
Thanks for reading!
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