this entry provides a little background on the journey. while most may measure their journey by time i prefer to measure it by knowledge. this was ultimately a big journey for me.
if you want to cut to the chase, here are the technical details
why
the world has too many social media choices already. it is becoming clear that the most popular ones are unhealthy for us in many ways. one reason may be the commercialization of personhood and the instant objectification of everything by influencers.
social media can be used to connect communities and make them stronger, but this doesn’t happen on a global level. it happens at a uniquely local level and it will benefit from tools that enable individuals to interoperate effectively.
bonfire apparently gets this. their roadmap includes focus on community and on the tools to enable interoperation of communities.
how
my experience building and hosting fediverse applications that include mastodon and friendica puts me in a smaller group of people that can help by running and testing new tools.
this also provides me with easy access to the environments and knowledge to build and host something like bonfire. being interested, and wanting to help, I created a short term server at ionos.com and got busy. i don’t do docker, so I chose the bare metal instructions
what
if the journey is measured by knowledge here are some of the nuggets. only one is technical they rest can be reused everywhere
- take your time and take good notes
- when reaching interim goals, save your progress
- stick with tools you already know when possible
- be open to learning new tools
- ask for help when you are stumped
- read all the first level docs of the source code <—-
at a less philosophical level i learned about:
- mise
- meilisearch
- just
- caddy
- single page application architecture
the issues I spent the most time on were some of the errors during build, needing to learn new tools, getting the proper versions of all the components. i spent way too long thinking my reason for upload failures was related to reverse proxy rules for nginx, then switching to caddy only to find the issue remained. its was from missing components because I had failed to read the source code.
frankly i couldn’t have done it without some help from the dev team, they saw my error messages and indicated I must have missed reading the deps.debian file. which of course I had.
these projects become a little bit of a reverse engineering exercise which can be fun but also can be infuriating.
I’m looking forward to playing with this release now and helping identify bugs.
-enjoy