Hello Fedi friends,
An update after Wednesday's post:
Sanity prevailed and I no longer feel like self-hosting my own Lemmy instance. Much better to donate to lemmy.world so I can support the fantastic work of Ruud and his team. I use it really sporadically anyway so I don't feel like going through the headache of installing yet another Fediverse software on my VPS and regularly maintaining it.
Supporting lemmy.world via LiberaPay took me about a minute yesterday and I felt a sense of relief, like: one less thing to worry about. So, I'm happy to stay on a managed Lemmy instance and donate to it.
But uh oh I'm in trouble with something else. Like, REAL trouble.
I logged onto my dormant Sharkey profile after a really long time – to test Bonfire notifications - and I was immediately smitten with it all over again. Sharkey's UX/UI is so elegant and fun – it reminded me of the presentation by Christine Lemmer-Webber at FediForum in June, where she encouraged us all to bring back joy to the fediverse and said that “we can’t succeed without joy” (check out an article about it).
I had written about Sharkey in the fall of last year:
Elena Rossini
and admittedly I had stopped using it when I began my self-hosting journey and started using GoToSocial instead (upon recommendations by many people on the Fediverse).
Don't get me wrong, GoToSocial is great, does its job and is light on resources but the web clients I use for it can't compare to the elegance of Sharkey. I miss it.
My consolidation plans consisted in moving my Friendica and Sharkey followers to GoToSocial, and then closing up these inactive accounts.
Now I feel like moving my Friendica and GoToSocial accounts to a self-hosted Sharkey instance.
Yes, I know, I know how that sounds.
But hey, reality disrupted my fanciful plans.
The decision for now is out of my control because I just checked YunoHost's app catalogue and Sharkey is reported as broken (insert screaming face).
Then the following things happened:
- I posted a message in YunoHost's forum asking about it (no official response yet);
- I researched managed Sharkey plans but taking agency out of my hands (aka going for something controlled by others) didn't feel right;
- I checked out instructions about how to install it with Docker (excuse for a third VPS here I come) but the information went over my head. Too technical for this newbie;
- I checked the YunoHost Sharkey package on GitHub (yes, I'm beginning to get a little desperate) and read about the issues... it seems that the latest update broke a lot of databases/accounts, ugh.
Two possible ways forward:
- staying put on GoToSocial and waiting for the YunoHost / Sharkey issues to resolve;
- resume using my Calckey.world account, set up monthly donations, and move my Friendica and GoToSocial there.
The latter plan doesn't feel right... I'm really fond of self-hosting my own Fediverse instances and going for yet another account hosted by someone else feels a little disempowering. So I will stay put on GoToSocial for now... and eagerly await the fixing of Sharkey.
I've got two hours before I need to pick up my little one from a summer program so it's a good time to try the MOVE function... moving my Friendica account to GoToSocial. Yes I know it's technically a Friday but I don't have much to lose with my Friendica stuff - I almost never used it.
Wish me luck!
Elena
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