Software is Hard

Frankly, the fact that this works at all is a miracle. As it turns out, the Internet as we know it is a wobbly Jenga tower of things that, amazingly, generally looks seamless to the end user. It's why people get paid to do this stuff.

I'd spent about a day trying to troubleshoot an issue with this writefreely instance – federation was working so that I could see the weblog and posts from other compatible instances, but you couldn't actually follow the weblog as there was a hiccup happening on the follow acknowledgement from writefreely.

The reason was that the instance crashed every time it got a follow request and couldn't send a response. Fortunately writefreely can be run with a debug flag that makes figuring that out pretty trivial. What to do next with the logs is another story.

Took everything to the write.as forum and got a response overnight from the lead dev. Turns out the issue resides with Go, where there's some misinterpretation for how “localhost” resolves (as opposed to explicitly stating 127.0.0.1) that was causing a segfault. The golang team is aware of the issue and has no plans to fix. Fortunately, there was a workaround for the current version of writefreely that will be fixed in the next release:

  1. Use 127.0.0.1 where appropriate in the writefreely config.ini.
  2. Set the env variable GODEBUG=netdns=go to force the Go DNS resolver only instead of the C resolver.

And now you can actually follow this weblog, not that anyone should.

Next, I get to figure out why I can't follow my peertube instance from my Akkoma account (works fine from Mastodon and Calckey!)

Edit 8/13: Following the Peertube instance from Akkoma just...works now. I didn't do anything to touch it.