SelfHosting on Marti Abernathey

Postiz is a good idea, in theory...

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:35:01 +0100

As a side note, I tried Postiz on Elest.io, and while it’s a great idea in theory, it’s not ready for prime-time. Think of Postiz like a self-hosted version of Hootsuite. Bluesky was the only app worked out of the box. I looked at their own hosting costs…and yeah (over £200) it isn’t going to work for me. People smarter than me, over on the Unraid Reddit, can’t even get it working.

Homelab Realities

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:39:39 +0100

During my journey through POSSE driven social media with a focus on open source/federated applications, I’ve picked up a few insights. As a homelabber, I was curious about running my own social media apps on my private NAS.

While I know it’s possible to expose my NAS/network to the internet, I feel that, from my perspective of being “smart enough to be dangerous,” it’s not the best idea for me. If I want to host something online, like Actual, PeerTube, or Mastodon, It’s more cost-effective (in terms of my time) and safer to use a fully managed DevOps platform like Elest.io or Pikapod. I’m fine with running local applications that don’t need internet exposure, but self-hosting Mastodon seems like a daunting task for someone like me. I still have nightmares about the time I tried to run group WordPress blogs on Transadvocate.com and kept getting hacked with bad MYSQL injections.

For now, I’m sticking to locally hosted, in network apps that don’t go outside my home network. I know myi limitations.

DeGoogling Expectations

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 16:17:13 +0100

In the past year and a half, I’ve been trying to de-google or to extract myself from algorithmically based social media apps. I’ve had a revelation in doing that. You’ve probably heard it before, but, if you do not pay for an app, you are the product.. When you’re using an open-source software (OSS) for maps, YouTube, email, or calendars, you are never going to find a perfect replacement. Those “perfect apps” sell your data, have hundreds or even thousands of developers working on them, and millions of money in VC funding, whereas these open-source alternatives do not. A good example is TikTok. I’m trying to wean myself off it, and the open-source alternative to TikTok is Loops. The UI is very similar but the community and the controls are very rudimentary. You’re not going to get A one-to-one comparison app, and you shouldn’t expect that. TikTok is a $1 billion company with thousands of developers working on it, whereas loops has one developer working on it.

When you use these open-source alternatives, you are trading perfection for privacy and security. You have to always keep that in mind when you are de-googling or de-algorithming (is that a word??) your online experience. When you take that into consideration, the experience becomes a lot easier to handle.

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:41:21 +0100

I’ve got the custom CSS fixed on my peertube instance the way I like it, at least for Desktop, but not yet for mobile. Work in progress, but I’m happy with it.

Who Owns Bluesky and Why it Matters

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:34:51 +0100

My initial reservations about Bluesky were that it is algorithm-based, it is a closed platform (you can’t run your own Bluesky server), and it was first created by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey.

Reading Cory Doctorow’s Bluesky and enshittification I had many questions. Simple questions centered around Bluesky seem hard to answer. They are hidden under layers of complexity. A question like, “can I run my own Bluesky instance?” is an example.

Laurens Hof over at the Fediverse Report explained it this way:

It turns out that once you start peeling back the layers of the technological side of decentralisation, more and more questions start to arise. This is because ATProto splits up the network into separate components, and makes each component open and accessible for others to use and run. This is good for making the network more decentralised, but funnily enough it makes understanding decentralisation all the more difficult. – Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power

and

Furthermore, what the protocol affords is not equal to what the average person can actually use. ATProto allows people to take full control of their own data by either self-hosting their PDS or using a hosting provider Doing so currently requires technical knowledge: easy from the perspective of an experienced programmer, but out of reach from the majority of the population.

You can run a PDS (personal data server), but your posts and all that data still get routed through Bluesky. Decentralization is great if you can pick up your data and go elsewhere. Where are you going to take that data if you leave Bluesky? There’s confusion through obfuscation in just about every part of Bluesky. Wikipedia provides clarity on this question. It lists the number of instances of both Mastodon (over 18k) and Bluesky (“mainly Bluesky”).

The obfuscation continued when I just asked the question to myself “who owns Bluesky”? My first stop in this little adventure was the BBC. They claim that:

It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation.

Wow, okay! What is a public benefit corporation?

It is a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society.

Currently, there are no legal standards that define what constitutes a benefit corporation. A benefit corporation need not be certified or audited by the third-party standard.

Who is Jay Graber?

In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered together bitcoin mining equipment. In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency. In 2019, she founded the event planning website Happening, Inc.

Next stop, TechCrunch! They claim that:

Decentralized social app Bluesky announced on Thursday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round, following its $8 million seed raise last year.

The Series A round is led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda.

Who is Blockchain Capital?

In 2013, Pierce joined brothers Bart and Bradford Stephens in founding venture capital firm Blockchain Capital (BCC)

Oddly, Brock Pierce isn’t listed as a co-founder on their Wikipedia page or on their website. Who is Brock Pierce? He’s a childhood star from the Mighty Ducks. He went on the run:

Fifteen years ago, Pierce cofounded a Southern California startup called Digital Entertainment Network. Despite raising tens of millions in venture capital, that company eventually went under. Not long before the company was slated to have its initial public offering in 1999, Pierce and two other cofounders were named in two civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of underage boys. Pierce was never charged criminally.

After the settlement, Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce fled to Spain as a second set of victims filed another lawsuit in California against the three alleging sexual abuse. The three men never responded to the case, and a judge awarded a default judgment and $4.5 million in damages.

Later, he became a cryptocurrency tycoon with Steve Bannon. Yes, that Steve Bannon.

Before he became CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, and before he took over the alt-right media outlet Breitbart, Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet.

The story focuses on the World of Warcraft marketplace called Internet Gaming Entertainment, where players could pay real money for virtual goods, like gold, in the game. The company was founded by former child star Brock Pierce, and Bannon was an investor.

I’ll continue to use sites like TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads to push my content. Still, I’m not going to build a community there. When it comes to Bluesky I have even more questions, than when I started researching this. I can’t trust that Bluesky won’t become another Twitter. There’s far too much venture capital and questionable alliances/history to feel comfortable there. “Trust us, bro” isn’t enough.