fen

Domains are expensive.

I didn't really put much thought into overall, longterm stability when I started zoner.gay, mostly with regard to cost. Frankly, I'm still surprised that the whole “hosting your own copy of a whole-ass microblogging site” thing has generally gone pretty well. The host migration from Digital Ocean to Hetzner that I talked about in my last post cut my actual hosting cost roughly in half. The other component is domain registrations. Zoner.gay was cheap to pick up, but renewal is going to run $50 when it next comes up. It's not for another 8 months, but that's not never.

The good news is I have a domain I've maintained for years that only runs $10/year – zoner.work. I've basically had zoner.work tied to a hosting plan with dreamhost for years running a managed WordPress site. I don't much like WordPress, so I never really used it as much more than a landing and the one time I made a JSON adapter for Super Mario 64 Bingo. In hindsight, I probably should've held on to that.

Tied to this, I'd been very curious to try one of the *key forks, so I spun up a test Firefish instance and spent a couple days exploring and configuring before falling in love with how polished the frontend felt and finally pulling the trigger and moving over myself. Its not been perfect, but its a great UI experience, at least compared to *oma. At time of writing, I'm about two weeks in and while I have a couple things on the wishlist for admin controls, and there was a weird import bug that led to me opening my first issue on a repo ever, I think this was the right choice.

All of this has been more or less in service of a larger goal – I'd like to open up my instance. If not to public, at least to friends. And even for my own sake, making things sustainable, stable, and affordable are solid long-term goals. I posted up a soft opening and we'll see if we get any takers – moving instances is a big deal and I'm not exactly someone people immediately jump instances for but maybe next time they need a backup or are looking to move, they'll remember me.

So, Firefish is the target for the new instance under the new domain. I absolutely still want to have writefreely for these longer-form posts. Owncast is a pretty easy move since there's only four followers. Nextcloud will be an absolute nightmare though, and I'm not looking forward to it. I'm sure I'll have a long post to write for when that ordeal comes.

The sorta cool thing about having the new instance up now is that, looking at a longer-term option, I've also set up S3 compatible storage for the instance. Obviously that adds a little bit of cost in dedicated storage in the short term (looking at about $4ish per month? we'll see when this month closes for billing), but I think long-term it'll save a lot of headache as the data store gets larger over time. We're already at 13 GB between the two of us, and it'll only get bigger from there.

I do want to take a moment, though, and despite joking about it earlier in the post, truly put to record a thanks to @andy@zoner.work for trusting me enough to make a jump with what is basically his entire social media presence. I didn't ask him to, but he wanted to check it out and then dove in the deep end to do it. It's humbling, it's warming, it's scary, it's emboldening, to have someone willing to completely put their presence in your hands. I treasure that. I can't fully put together a string of words that captures what I think I feel because I'm pretty sure that combination doesn't exist. In lieu of that, I will say this: thank you.

Part of me wants to say 'I hope that to be the first of many' but I don't really think that's what I feel. I do hope at some point it's more than just the two of us on zoner.work, but I don't want that to be because of any individual. I hope to be part of a community of people who share, respect, and dignify each other in a way that I felt when I joined tech.lgbt back in November. I hesitate to say it feels like a calling, but I do think as far as contributions I can make, that being a part of building a safe space within the fediverse is something that I would be suited to, and something that I want to participate in.

Time will tell.