julian

I'm caught in a self-sovereignty self-hosting knot of ambition. Some days it seems everything I want to simplify or improve or upgrade is blocked by something else. I want to blog more from my WriteFreely instance, and for the time being I can, but it's bothering me that it's out of date, running on an out-of-date Yunohost-11. I'm proud to have set up staging copies of much of my infrastructure so I can try a test upgrade, but that reveals the upgrade is broken, so instead I want to migrate it either to a fresh Yunohost-12, but I discover that no longer supports exactly the same way of logging in with its SSO at my base-domain which is managed separately outside Yunohost (I'm skipping lots of details, they're beside the point here), and it reminds me WF is one of my last few “production” services still running in YNH. I want to get them out of YNH because for all its good points it's designed as a monolith, not to plug and compose with other infrastructure, so... I could migrate Writefreely instead to another hosting method outside Yunohost, like MASH, so I try that and find support for Mariadb isn't yet implemented in MASH-WriteFreely, so I could either add Mariadb support myself and then migrate the DB directly, or let it use another DB and instead try to migrate the posts and subscribers and metadata through WriteFreely's API... and so on for my other services. Ugh. I mean, I knew it would be like this. I chose this path, and I kind of like it. Sometimes I even find that software has been developed in the meantime that does indeed simplify and improve things for me, like when projects add support for SSO, and that's wonderful! But just so much still remains to do... And I'm trying to skip some of the nitty-gritty by looking ahead to better technologies: want to move infrastructure from Docker in VMs in Proxmox to mostly LXCs in Incus, eventually learn Nix and K8s, want to get involved in improving, unifying, standardising some of the best of small-medium scale hosting frameworks like Yunohost, Co-op Cloud, SelfHostBlocks/Skarabox, Fediversity. I realised at this stage any more tweaking I do to my private infra is more or less a waste, now that I've learnt from it. What matters is what I can contribute to projects that others share, so I'm aiming that way now. And thinking of some ways to “level up” this world of personal data self-sovereignty and make things that ordinary people can use, plug-and-play kit for family and friends and schools to store and easily manage their identity and data. Have (some) skills and (maybe good) ideas; lack money and time. Must get around to writing about the ideas at least. Is my WriteFreely still holding up for now? Whew.

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