Hello Fedi friends!
If you followed my #Sharkey misadventures last week - chronicled on my GoToSocial account (here and here and here), you might have been wondering: what's next?
In case you don't want to click on those links, the saga can be quickly summed up like this: I successfully installed a Sharkey instance via YunoHost but struggled to set up an account... only to find out you need to set permissions to "All visitors" first. Then I got to the account setup screen and got asked to provide two predefined passwords. With a sprinkling of luck I managed to create an account... which turned out to be completely cut off from the Fediverse, with broken search and a very difficult way to follow any accounts. Then I was locked out from my account, with 2FA codes not working and recovery codes also giving error messages. This was the final straw.
The Sharkey instance I had set up was incredibly rickety.
I realized that as much as I abhor Big Tech commercial social platforms, it's also not wise at all to go in the absolute opposite direction, putting trust in self-hosted solutions that may be unstable. I've been really fortunate these past 10 months running a self-hosted GoToSocial microblogging account, PeerTube video sharing platform and a Pixelfed account for photos... not to mention NextCloud for file sharing. I never had issues with any of those (and you can add Friendica to the list, as I self-hosted an account for a few months with zero issues).
My experience with Sharkey was a total lemon, a bust, but it's an outlier. If anything, I now have the greatest gratitude for the developers of GoToSocial, which is rock solid. I had a couple of minor issues in the 10 months I've been using it daily and the devs offered solutions on their Matrix support channel instantaneously. PeerTube and NextCloud have also been top notch.
My gut tells me not to put trust in something that by comparison is really shaky and unreliable - so I just uninstall Sharkey, resumed using my Sharkey account hosted on calckey.world and set up monthly recurring donations for it.
I feel a tiny bit defeated but I thought I shouldn't lose sight of my original goal: to have an alternate Fediverse account that is small and private, to interact with Fedi friends away from the noise of Mastodon and GoToSocial (where mentions some days can be in the dozens or even hundreds). Now I can use Sharkey on an instance that I find reliable... while supporting the dot world group. And that's a good thing.
Thanks for being here,
Ele
P.S.: I typed and I'm publishing this via my Raspberry Pi 5 with Ubuntu that I turned into a desktop computer - exciting!
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