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
