Dear Fedi friends,
In the past year I have gone through a few phases:
June - December 2024: explore
January - June 2025: self-host
now: consolidate
What do I mean by that? Well, from June to December of last year I went on various Fediverse explorations, trying out Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sharkey and testing interoperability between them. I also federated three Wordpress blogs I run.
From January till June of this year I embarked on a great self-hosting adventure, setting up my own instances of GoToSocial, Pixelfed, Friendica and PeerTube (aided by the superb YunoHost.org) and I even manually installed Ghost and Varnish Cache on another VPS, in order to blog here.
I have so many Fediverse accounts that I sometimes forget the actual number - or what their purpose is. In the past few weeks I've been drawn to the concept of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and I began publishing "my adventures in self-hosting" on my Wordpress blog, instead of straight to GoToSocial, like I had been doing for six months. I wanted to have a more organized system, a better way to archive, find old posts and re-read them. An endless scroll on my GoToSocial feed wasn't it. So, "consolidate" has started to feel like the theme of the next six months for me.
Resisting the Mastodon stampede
But then... I ran into a problem with my Wordpress blog. And I realized that, as enthusiastic I was about federation of blog posts (anything I publish on Wordpress is immediately posted on the fediverse, and blog followers can read full posts in their feeds), I overlooked some big issues. The proverbial "failing to see the forest for the trees."
I must emphasize that my "Wordpress problems" have NOTHING to do with the technology itself, its federation or any of my site's plugins. The problem is withstanding sudden rushes of traffic and requests coming in from Mastodon. Yesterday I chronicled how every time I reply to one of my federated Wordpress posts from my Mastodon account, I would DDOS myself, sending thousands of requests in less than a minute and taking my site offline. The "Mastodon Hug of Death" or Mastodon stampede, if you will. (Even the blog It's FOSS spoke about this, telling their readers: "Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why!")
I have written about this issue several times in the past and encountered resistance and disbelief. People would reply to my posts denying the existence of such a problem. So last month, I shared a screenshot from my web hosting company's Dashboard, visualizing the Mastodon Hug of Death (scroll to the end for a screenshot of the "stampede"):
Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ , elena (open profile)
An excerpt:
a few minutes ago I experienced the Hug of Death (also known as the "Mastodon stampede") after posting a link to my Wordpress site. I had made a landing page for my Fedi promo video where you can download shorter clips and stills. A few SECONDS after posting a toot with the link on Mastodon my Wordpress site went offline. I immediately deleted the toot and went to check out the dashboard of my web hosting site, so I could clear the cache. This is the image I saw - I GASPED OUT LOUD: nearly 4000 requests in seconds. That's how you DDOS yourself 🤪
This problem went from occasional to recurring as I adopted POSSE and started regularly sharing links to my Wordpress blog.
I was actually afraid to post any links to my blog from my Mastodon account because of its 8,200 followers from hundreds of servers.
Yesterday I decided to beef up the site's caching and CDN and even signed up for BunnyCDN - a solid content delivery network from Slovenia:
Elena Rossini
Problem is: even with Bunny protecting it, my site completely froze when I posted a reply to a federated blog post from my Mastodon account.
I was advised I should probably pay for a BunnyCDN add-on. I saw that "Bunny shield" costs 9.95 a month - in addition to the pay-as-you go caching Bunny provides.
That's when I had a eureka moment: why complicate things when I already have a beautiful, fully functional Ghost blog protected by Varnish cache? And Ghost will provide federation to self-hosted blogs later this summer anyway?
From Wordpress to Ghost
If I really want to CONSOLIDATE social profiles and websites, I should keep my Wordpress site as a portfolio of my creative work... and move all my blogging efforts to Ghost... instead of blogging in two different places.
The number one piece of advice I gave my interns Sam and Riyen (who worked with me on the Fediverse promo video) was: cultivate your mailing list and a direct relationship with your audience. Well, if I were to follow my own advice, I would move all my blogging efforts to Ghost - my site has a button that encourages readers to sign up for my newsletters.
So that's what I'm doing.
This is the first "my adventures in self-hosting" post on Ghost. I edited the routes.yaml file so that these posts won't show up on the homepage, but will be in a category of their own. Let's see if the filtering works.
I must confess, it's bittersweet to give up publishing blog posts on my Wordpress blog. I LOVED its ActivityPub for Wordpress plugin (and the team behind it). But at the end of the day, I think it's smarter to consolidate blogging efforts in one place... and I like the feeling of not being afraid to post a link to my blog from Mastodon. Because Varnish Cache is a potent shield - a real beast.
Let me know your thoughts about this... at the end of the day all my experiments aim to make creative people think about publishing options available to them - outside the tentacles of Big Tech platforms.
Onwards & upwards,
Elena
⚠️ Update: a kind reader (@teapot_ben@glammr.us) alerted me that Ghost creates a separate RSS feed for these posts ("my so called sudo life") because I am excluding them from the homepage and putting them in a separate collection. I actually LIKE this, as I do not want to overwhelm people not interested in self-hosting with daily posts about it. So if you want to get these via RSS, here is the code:
https://news.elenarossini.com/tag/my-so-called-sudo-life/rss
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