Still bad at it!

2022-11-12

Okay, so I'm still bad at this stuff. It doesn't help that the Gemini server I was using doesn't seem to have the most well constructed PKGBUILD, so it overwrote my configuration file the last time I updated it and since I don't really check my own gemsite I didn't realize it wasn't running. Ugh.

Anyway, not a whole lot of new stuff going on. I've been trying to find the time to learn Rust, hoping that I can use it to write some new BBS software. It's funny that, back in the heyday of BBSing, I was almost always dissatisfied with the software available. There were so many programs to choose from, and a lot of them were really good, but while they'd have just ab out all the features I wanted, there was always something lacking that ended up being a Big Deal later. So I switched programs a lot just trying to find the perfect one.

I think it's a bit premature to write down what I'd plan on doing, especially since I still have to teach myself Rust first. But the idea would be a nice, easy-to-use mixture of old and new technologies, maybe also utilizing Gemini, ActivityPub, and some other stuff. It would also be nice for it to have at least some expectation of security, since the majority of older ones don't even bother since they're assuming your passwords will always be sent plain-text anyway.

Of course, that brings me to to another thought.

ActivityPub

I am growing increasingly frustrated with ActivityPub, and this is just as a user. I've been running a Pleroma instance for a few years now, and it works well enough, but I don't particularly like Pleroma because its written in Elixir (which I find weird and don't really like), is difficult form me to troubleshoot, and has its own somewhat negative associations due to people that have worked on the project in the past.

I tried witching to GoToSocial, a newer ActivityPub server written in Go. It was at this point I learned that it's extremely difficult to switch to different server software in the fediverse if you're using the same domain. Part of it seems to be the keys used for the server and/or accounts, that different implementations use different information to determine if a server is unique, and that information may not be able to be maintained between migrations. So after trying with GoToSocial for multiple days and being unable to follow or send messages to anyone, I switched everything back to Pleroma, where it all just started working again.

It's entirely possible I did this incorrectly and missed something vitally important that isn't clearly documented anywhere. But it really seems it's more that nobody ever considered the possibility that someone might need to switch servers, may lose their data and have to start over, etc. With the current state of things it looks like you're bound to a specific server software for a single domain forever, with no way to ever change it. Very, very annoying. There has to be a better way to do this.

Okay, rant time over. Maybe I'll have something completely unrelated to tech to post about next time! Like cats =^.^=! Or maybe pizza. Who knows? I guess we'll find out later.

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