2024-08-25 GoToSocial problems
==============================

So you're considering self-hosting? You heard good things about
GoToSocial? I like it. I use it. This post is about the problems you
should be expecting at the moment.

It's not surprising, after all. This is a very prominent sentence in
their README:

> GoToSocial is still ALPHA SOFTWARE.

But what are the exact problems? Sometimes alpha software is good
enough, right?

​#Social_Media #GoToSocial ​#GoToSocial

Major annoyances
----------------

No post editing. I hope you can handle your own typos. All you have
is "Delete and Redraft". But that orphans all replies, undoes all
boosts, forgets all likes and removes posts from bookmarks. "Delete
and Redraft" is a sledge hammer. "Edit post" is a delicate quill. And
you don't get to have it. YOLO! (You only live once.)

No filtering. You can mute and block and all that, but when everybody
is posting about Monsterdon, the European Song Contest, the US
elections, Caturday or Wordle, you can't filter those hashtags. You
must endure the enthusiasm of the people you are following. (I think
the developers are implementing things, but it does not seem to have
an effect in the front-ends I use, so who knows.)

Limited federation. This one is hard to spot. You want to follow this
account and that account and it all seems to work until you go back
and find that for one account, your follow request seems to hang in
limbo, waiting. You cancel, and follow again. It seems to work. Come
back later, back in limbo again, waiting. If you check the log, you'll
find errors about signatures failing and what not. I have no idea.
There are currently 8 open issues containing the word 'signature'.
Something is not working and you'll have to have an alt (a separate
account) on a different server that doesn't have this issue. That
makes me sad. 😥

Minor annoyances
----------------

No automatic post expiry. And you cannot use Mastodon Archive
because of some version number check the Python Mastodon library
refuses to work.

No problem
----------

No front-end. There is no front-end. I use apps like Toot! on my
phone and Semaphore on the web. I don't need anything fancy. And for
the non-fancy options, I have mastodon.el for Emacs, toot for the
command-line, tuba for Gnome, bitlbee-mastodon for IRC, and so on.
There are plenty of options.

The good stuff
--------------

Markdown in your posts. I like my code blocks.

SQLite on the server. It's currently 8.4G. The media stuff is 11G.

Memory footprint. I use Monit to monitor processes and this process
uses 185.6 MB.

No admin. I haven't had to run any administration task. Not once. ❤️

2024-09-14. @technomancy@hey.hagelb.org wrote about his GoToSocial
setup:

> So what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can
> walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different;
> that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational
> overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need
> the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of
> uptime … It's fine. – in which social media can be put in your own
> hands