< Notes...

The one thing I wanted and planned to do during the holidays that I did not do was migrate to a new VPS. It simply didn’t happen. And that’s fine; it will have to be. In fact, it’s for the best, because I am certain I don’t want to be on the Fediverse anymore—which is a service I would have migrated had I proceeded as planned.

I don’t quite have my bearings in 2026 yet, but I trust I will soon.

I now have a plan to—finally!—migrate to a new VPS. Well, I have a timeframe, actually. I will be using some of the free time I will have during the holidays to end this saga. I will also add a couple of other services to my selfhosted collection. Running my own IRCd is on the tentative list, as I am not quite sure about it.

Behold, the master procrastinator! So shameful! The issue is dire now, and I have planned to use the end of year break—after all, I will not have anything else to do—to get this done, at all cost.

Having used Matrix in the past, and even self-hosted my own Matrix “homeserver”, I can categorically say—in my (own) very, very humble opinion—that it sucks eggs.

I don’t think I have noted about this before, it doesn’t come up on the few searches I have run. I have been procrastinating a move to a newer VPS. This one has been running since Ubuntu 16.04, and it is now at 22.04. It is running out of space, and I truly need to replace it. Hmm…

I figure the only way to get me moving is by renting the new server, and then having to worry about paying double expenses. Then my partner will make sure I do something about it! 😂

I have not mentioned Headscale before, even though I use it every day. I have my iPhone (on demand), my Mac, my Linux laptop (on demand), and my two VPS connected to it. Headscale is an open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server. You can use the Tailscale client—which is available for all platforms—to connect to it. It is amazing, and worthy—at the very minimum—of a star on its GitHub repository.

Oh oh, should I worry? My brew upgrade just updated Hugo to v0.147.7. Last time I upgraded it everything broke loose. I figure I may as well test it, so this is it. If this post shows without errors, I should consider myself lucky, and clap twice.

I need to stop procrastinating, and migrate to another VPS. The one I am using now has been upgraded in place since Ubuntu 16.04, and it is full of cruft. I long, need, a newer machine. I will have to dedicate contiguous time to that which, I think, it is holding me back. I am keeping Vultr (referral link), though.

As my PDS stopped working for no particular reason, and no feedback has been given to my issue on their git repository, I have disabled it. That means I just “Poof!” myself out of Atproto.

All of the sudden, and without any apparent reason, my BlueSky PDS stopped working. Maybe it’s my VPS telling me to get rid of it.

So that I can remember to create a Gist with this later. Useful if you run GoToSocial, have moved to it from another service, and want to keep your initial Fediverse or ActivityPub “joined date”.

# Find the user ID.
select id, created_at from accounts where username = 'username_here'

# Use newly found user ID to update the "created_at" field.
update accounts set created_at = '2016-10-04 21:27:33+00:00' where id = 'user_id_here';

Sometime in the very near future I am going to move my Mastodon instance to a new hardware. When that happens, there are two possible outcomes: it is successful, or it isn’t. If it isn’t I am going to be in whole lot of pain. Will keep a “glass half full” mentality for now.

Conduit is the easiest, fastest, leanest way to run a Matrix server. A single binary, and a small configuration file. Can’t beat that!

Update: 21 Feb 2026 @ 16:15:26

Or, as George pointed out, docker compose up.

Removed HTML and CSS files from caching here (server side). I don’t like having to hard refresh to see a new note. Let’s see if it works.

Seems to be working! I simply created a separate header @content cache-control max-age=0, where @content has HTML, and CSS files in it.

For as much as I hate doing this, I believe—unless I find a way further down the line to bring in the old entries—this is a fresh start here. Why? Because the way I was crafting these little notes would not scale. At certain point I used Hugo, then wiped it by mistake (because I do idiotic things sometimes), and then I concocted this Frankenstein of a Bash script. The end result is a file that doesn’t allow for easy editing, nor it is portable. So, here we are.

This time I am starting over—again—with Hugo. Everything in life is ephemeral, and this is no different.