Post by @jac@404brain.boo
Well, I've somehow managed to get #littlefedi running on my own VPS! I even managed to follow my social.lol account from it, and vice versa.
Feeling quite pleased with myself right now. 😄 I'd better go sleep though, it's almost 5am.
6 likes
@jac@404brain.boo Nice one ! I think #LittleFedi is great as choice of ActivityPub platforms is always welcome.
More importantly, the ease of installation, minimal ongoing administration effort and the very low resource footprint might entice more 'non-technical' users to experiment and start hosting single user (or small-medium) instances.
@andyc@yakshaving.social It's pretty amazing! I'm really impressed with how light and responsive it is.
I don't know about truly "non-technical" users. I know a lot of people that genuinely struggle with tech, and while I'm no developer, I'm not in that category either. But I think if you're used to maintaining websites or similar, this isn't too hard. Certainly a lot easier than Mastodon seems.
That said, I'm still waiting for me to hit a wrong button somewhere and then watch the whole setup explode. I'm not completely inept though, I have backups in place. 😄
@jac@404brain.boo Yes. My use of 'non-technical' users is slightly tongue in cheek and self-deprecating.
I often used the term at work to lure clients (Oracle DBA's) into a false sense of security ('Oh god, he's just another pesky consultant') and then ambush them with deep, probing, technical questions. Never blag a blagger ! :-)
I suspect your technical skills are similar to mine. We can acquire a domain name, purchase some cheap VPS hosting, spin up a Linux instance, maintain, secure and update that server, install/remove Linux packages, follow instructions to install third party software packages and log bug reports and enhancement requests to (hopefully) provide useful feedback to the developers.
However, I wouldn't class my as a developer and can't troubleshoot network and firewall issues without resorting to Google.
So yes, we are 'technical' but just not wizards !
@andyc@yakshaving.social I'm pretty good at following instructions, but yeah I'm definitely not a wizard. :D
I used to be pretty good with CSS but I had a long gap where I didn't use those skills, and so now I find myself in the position of having to learn a lot again. My brain very much has a "use it or lose it" approach. I'm quite envious of those who can do proper coding - I've tried, many times, but I inevitably get bored and give up not too far into it.
Give me some software with a lot of configuration to do and I'm a happy bunny, though. I'll happily spend hours doing nothing but tweaking settings. I don't know what that makes me, other than slightly odd. :D