#Fediverse

Muensterland.social - Our new Mastodon instance

It's been quite a while since we've taken online the last public service for everyone.
Working on open source software is important for the whole community and it needs much time and resources but our server was quite bored all the time.
So additionally to the open source development stuff which will of course continue,we do now host a regional #Mastodon instance for public registration.
The #Fediverse is a great network with many nice people and it's built completely with open source software.
It's important for us to support a network of this sort and that was the right time to give something back to the network.
We had planned putting online a new Mastodon instance for a long time but then we saw that a small German instance would go offline soon and decided to take it over.
Continuing an existing service and making sure that all existing users don't lose their digital home is much better than creating a completely new service out of the nothing.
You can find the instance at Muensterland.social but it's mainly meant for people near Muenster and most posts are in German.
The instance runs with the #GlitchSoc software (Git repo) which is a fork of Mastodon which allows more settings for users as well as server admin.
For example GlitchSoc makes the 5000 chars limit instead of 500 chars possible and that's important for heaving real conversations and not just a short message.
Additionally we do now have a #Halcyon instance at web.Muensterland.social so you can use it with the easy and beautiful design of Twitter.
Muensterland.social runs on a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server with two Intel Xeon Quad Core CPUs,32GB memory and 4x72GB RAID5 HDDs so there is still much space for new users.
Feel free to check it out and give comments how you like it.
For the next few weeks or months,there are even more free public services planned but you have to wait for the details until it comes online.

glitch-soc/mastodon

A glitchy but lovable microblogging server. Contribute to...

GitHub
Muensterland.social

Ein kostenloses und werbefreies soziales Netzwerk für Personen aus Münster...

Mastodon hosted on muensterland.social

Times are changing - So are services

Today we finally gave an update to the list of services on our homepage.
Yes,this blog was quite quiet during the last few months but we still did much work to make the web a better place,mostly with minor updates for #Halcyon which aren't worth longer posts.
The more important news are our two new #Mastodon #GlitchSoc instances https://mstdn.es and https://mastodon.bayern in addition to our first instance https://muensterland.social .
Mstdn.es was launched as a totally new service at the beginning of the year to provide a new home for many Spanish people who were moving away from #Twitter to the #Fediverse .
There weren't many Spanish instances back then so we decided to create one,even without anyone from the Nikisoft team being able to read or write Spanish but https://deepl.com/translator is a big help in that case.
Some months later,we've taken over Mastodon.bayern as the former administrator wanted to leave while keeping the service up and running.
As always,we wanted to help the free and open social network and therefore made the decision to take this instance over and give it a safe future.
In response to the huge additional need of resources,we expanded the disk space for media on our server hardware and should be well prepared for the next months and then we still have three slots left for another additional hard disks.
As of now,the bandwidth doesn't seem to be a limiting factor - we were very worried about that at the beginning.
All three instances are running on the same machine so that we could setup a VDO (Virtual Disk Optimizer) partition which does deduplication on the media and saves us tons of disk space.
They all seem to have a more or less active community with some people who post on a regular base and we're happy to provide them a free home in the social media world.
On other news,we made the decision to discontinue our services YouFail and ChromeOS Forum and took them down already,including the remove of all links from our information page.
Both sites have never been popular and only wasted resources on our servers as well as money for the domain so we thought it would be better to take them offline,nobody will miss them anyway.
In future we're planning to provide even more services,as always free of trackers and free to use.
In the coming months,important changes to our infrastructure will be made allowing us to scale further and protect the privacy of our users even better.
We're planning to migrate from #CloudFlare as content delivery network and protection suite to the paid Swiss company #KeyCDN because many of our users are worried about the privacy at CloudFlare.
As https://keycdn.com is billed on a per-use base instead of different fixed-price plans for enhanced features,we will be able to make use of even more features while paying a fair price based on our organic growth.
By migrating to KeyCDN,we will be able to save much bandwidth and traffic due to their improved caching features where edge nodes ask a central KeyCDN cache server first before they ask our own application server.
We expect huge improvements on performance and scalability for our Mastodon media delivery by that.
Additionally we're planning to migrate all of our domains step by step from https://lima-city.de to https://hostsharing.net as our old provider has made some decisions like preventing all #Tor users from accessing their service and all webpages of their users or uploading backups of all user data to Google Cloud and we're not willing to support that by wasting even more money at this company.
We're a bit sad that it had to come to such an end because we've been using their service for many years but #Hostsharing seems to be a very good alternative which fully respects privacy by not using any third-party services on their website,allowing access using Tor and not transferring user data to third-parties in other countries.
Unfortunately the remaining time of the domains can't be transferred so we have to make all transfers short before the domain expires to prevent the waste of even more money.
For the main domain nikisoft.one this means that we have to wait almost three years while we can start to transfer the first domain in one or two months already.
That's all for now and we hope that you like what we did and what we're planning to do.
As always,we're happy about your feedback which you can submit by replying to this post using a ActivityPub compatible software like Mastodon or privately using our contact form at https://www.nikisoft.one/contact.php
We'll soon post a follow-up which exclusively covers the development of #CloudFirewall which recently made a new milestone with the release of version 2.0.0