As I finally upload my new website to my VPS in the middle of the night, after weeks of procrasination and debugging the various issues I've had with my setup. I can finally rest for a little bit before taking the bus to school.
My laptop then decided to short its Thunderbolt controller, leaving it unable to charge and leaving my website's files locked down onto my computer for a month before I received a replacement motherboard from eBay. Also the fonts are broken. Anyways, here's a recap of the last month.
New VPS
While I liked Vultr, their pricing was way too expensive for what they were offering, and I wanted to find a new host that was cheaper while providing more resources. I remembered that GitHub Education offers you $200 in free credits for DigitalOcean, which I moved everything to around early October. Of course, these credits won't last forever and DigitalOcean is still very expensive, so I'm expecting yet another VPS migration within the next 9 months.
Podman Docker challenge
I decided that for this new server that I would only run stuff under Podman and podman-compose, not allowing anything to be ran on bare metal. While initially it was working just fine after all the trouble of configuring it as rootless, I reached an issue regarding the Misskey instance where the client was unable to access the database which required me to switch to Docker. There's probably another way to get it working under Podman again, but it'd be too much effort for such a small change
XMPP issues
The only problem left to solve with the migration is the XMPP server. Setting up stuff like XMPP or Matrix has always been a pain, and it looks like that in order to fit the new Docker requirement, I will have to use Snikket as the XMPP server instead of transferring Prosody over, which isn't well supported on Docker (doesn't really matter much though because Snikket is just an easier to set-up Prosody) and is the easiest route for Docker-based XMPP. Since I was the only user, it isn't that huge of a priority to get working again, however it should be back online eventually.
New services
However, I still have some new services available. Introducing Linkding and Pleroma.
The Pleroma instance is not even a week old, so there's still a lot of issues regarding and it should not be considered as the most stable instance of Pleroma out there (ie. registrations are messed up and media isn't going through Backblaze).
Linkding is completely stable on the other hand, and the only thing left missing for it is self-serve registration, which is built into the software and can be enabled, but which doesn't seem to show up for some reason. Either way, message me and I'll create an account for you.
Future blogposts
I've been thinking about writing some blog posts about the social web ("fediverse"), and I haven't been able to start working on getting them on this blog. However, now that everything is back to normal, I've started to work on a couple of posts that should come out soon. Expect them to be very terrible.
Conclusion
That's about everything that has happened in the last month, and XMPP will be fixed soon. In the future, I plan to set up Tor and I2P proxies for my services if you want to use it, and maybe some other stuff. Thanks for bothering to read all of this.