Feels good to finally be launched. For those curious, my focus was on the VR streaming, mostly on the dongle, and co-authoring our multi-link streaming. https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe

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Coffee cup

As someone unskilled in pastamancy, the practice of reading the future from pasta, I'd like to hear an expert opinion on how to interpret this perfect lining up of penne in my pasta pan after draining.

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A photo of a pot on a stove. Lined up like soldiers along the edge of the pot are about 2 dozen penne.

In general, I've been on Hubzilla for the last five years. Back then, it was an easy onramp onto the Fediverse as it only needed a LAMP stack, and I had that already, so installing it was fairly simple. I used the web interface on my laptop, and for doomscrolling I used Nomad, which is an app basically providing a webview of the main Hubzilla website with some extra amenities.

While Hubzilla generally worked well, there were some niggles. Hubzilla by itself is not an ActivityPub thing; it is a multi-social-network thing (hence the name) that has ActivityPub as one of the protocols you can plug into it. That made it a bit awkward to use: for instance, it uses its own markup language and things that are easy to use on Mastodon-adjacent servers, like adding alt text to images, just weren't easy to do. In addition: Hubzilla is built to support larger instances, and this also kind-of shows in the architecture. Long story short: while I certainly like Hubzilla as a project, it always was a bit of a mis-fit for what I needed: a single-user instance with ActivityPub as the only protocol.

Onto snac2. Snac2 is a different beast for sure. Rather than web-based through and through, it's more like yer olde standard Unix mailserver: it's written in C, admin is done via the command line, all storage is in a directory with files and hardlinks. I've been maintaining Linux-servers since forever, so I had no issues getting it up and running. It has a Mastodon client API, so you can plaster whatever app or web frontend you can find for that over it, but it also has a rather minimalistic web frontend of its own. That alone gives a fair bit more flexibility than Hubzilla.

In general, I like my new setup: it does its job, all things that I need are in a more accessible space, and with snac2 written in plain C, I'm sure that whatever I need, I can add myself. Given that my first PR for upstream snac2 (some fairly trivial doc corrections) were merged fairly quickly, it may even make it back into upstream.

The biggest niggle I have, and one that I may fix myself at some point, is that Hubzilla had a way of showing the home feed that I can't quite replicate. Hubzilla had an option to show all posts, with threads 'folded out' but their place in the global timeline pinned by the time the first post showed up, and later replies not bumping it. This had the advantage of a home feed that was consistent (with replies to threads not bumping up things I already read) and still grouped by thread rather than as loose posts (like Mastodon does it).

Getting that back seems an issue. In its web-UI, Snac2 does threading excellently, but it does the bump-a-thread-on-a-new-reply thing, which means I see a busy thread a lot of times. I could use the 'hide' function to fix this, but I'd be clicking that all the time, which I don't want. I could also use a Mastodon client, but it seems threading on the home feed is a Hard Thing to begin with using the Mastodon API: I have not found a client which does that yet.

All in all: positive change I think, but I may need to dive into the snac2 sources to make it do what I want.

Welcome to Mastodon @sprite_tm!

I'm happy to see such a great member of the #hardwarehacking community joining our ranks on Mastodon : )