#Halcyon

New blog with new design and ActivityPub support

It was absolutely time for bringing a new blog online.
The previous one was already quite outdated when we brought it online but we decided for it anyway because it was simple and free and we didn't have that big server capacities back then.
In the old situation it was a big advantage that it was centralized and hosted for free on MyBlogs servers so we had no trouble with it.
The downsides were the third party ads which ignore your privacy and couldn't be turned off - And for us that we had to rely on a third party we couldn't control.
We learned our lessons when there were some server outages but due to the software being proprietary,there wasn't a quick and easy solutions so we stayed there a little longer and longer and...
After our big success with the #Mastodon client #Halcyon and a growing number of users which could theoretically visit the blog,it was clear that something better would be needed sooner or later.
It's later now and the new and much better and more modern blog is finally online.
It was clear that the next blogging software must be open source and run on our own infrastructure which grow enough to handle all the traffic - At least we hope so,let's try if it's true.
Another of our requirements was the #ActivityPub support because we're doing much in the ActivityPub network so it wouldn't make sense not to have our blog there.
With this requirement the amount of available software wasn't that big anymore: Only Wordpress,Plume,WriteAs and Microblog.pub were left.
The biggest blogging software is #Wordpress but it's totally bloated and nearly every theme includes some third-party shit and ActivityPub support is only available using addons which are still in alpha stage so this one fell out of the decision quite early.
#WriteAs and #Plume are both very cool softwares which are built for ActivityPub Support from the very beginning and they are free of trackers and not that bloated so good choices but they're made for instances with more users what you can see in the way it's built and we think that's great for the big majority but not for our simple and small blog which should just contain some project updates.
Only #MicroblogPub is left at this point and that has been my personal favourite from the point when I first heard about it but when it also made the best points in the direct comparison,it was clear what software we have to use.
Microblog.pub is a single-user blogging software written in #Python which is open source and has only a few dependencies.
In it's original version you can see that it's meant for short posts even if it doesn't have a hardcoded character limit and should be used more in the way of a lightweight,single-user Mastodon instance.
To make it look more like a normal blog,we've rewritten most of the frontend source code using PureCSS which looks modern and isn't that bloated.
We made our modified source code available in the NikisoftBlog NotABug repository to make it easy for other people to run their own ActivityPub based blog.
We hope that you like what we did here and we're happy about comments,bug reports and feature requests in the comments (you can just reply to this post using a ActivityPub supporting software) or in our #NotABug issues.
But when requesting a feature,please keep in mind that this is a low priority project which we mainly do for our own use and as long as we don't attract hundreds of users,it may take some time until feature requests are implemented because we also have to work on our more popular projects.
Like this post?You can also follow this blog now using every ActivityPub compatible software.

tsileo/microblog.pub

A self-hosted, single-user, ActivityPub powered microblog. - tsileo/microblog.pub

GitHub
nipos/nikisoftblog

microblog.pub fork with new design and some customizations for running the...

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

Halcyon 2.4.0 adds sharing and more

Yesterday we've released #Halcyon version 2.4.0 which is a bit bigger than usual updates so it's time for a blog post once again.
The biggest and most important thing is that every Halcyon instance has a share page now at /intent/toot where you can link to from your website.
We already have a small script and a documentation page for using the share button,see here
It looks pretty much the same as Twitters share page and also allows writing without being logged in and then login when sending just like they do.
To make a redirect easy,we kept the API similar to #Twitter - You can simply rewrite twitter.com/intent/tweet to your-instance.com/intent/toot
Additionally we're planning a #Firefox extension which should automatically replace all Tweet buttons with Toot buttons so that you can use the share feature also on bigger sites which don't care about the fediverse.
Another thing that changed in version 2.4.0 is that there are small overlays when hovering a mention now.
#Mastodon does not have such a feature but Twitter has it and it's quite useful so we decided to add it to Halcyon.
When hovering over a mention,it will now show some basic information about the user like display name,about me and count of toots,followers and followings.
One of the bugfixes is that Pleroma users weren't able to add new accounts to lists caused by Pleromas change of the user ID format what wasn't fixed in Halcyon at this point.
Another bugfix is that Halcyon does now keep your scroll position when you aren't on top of the timeline and there are new posts appearing.
We're proud to announce that our language support still keeps growing.
There's an Arabic translation now which is unfortunately incomplete but we added it anyway.
This means that Halcyon does now support 13 different languages and we expect this number to grow even more in future.
If you want to help with translating Halcyon,you can do that on our Pootle instance.
Your help is also needed for existing languages as we added new strings for translation with this version.
We hope that you like what we're doing.
Feel free to give us feedback as comment to this post,as NotABug issue or as mention to @halcyon@social.csswg.org
We're always happy about constructive feedback,feature requests and bug reports.

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