my adventures in #selfhosting - day 132 (awesome allies edition) 
ICYMI: last week I installed and began tweaking my own #PeerTube instance – thanks to the ease and awesomeness of #YunoHost: @ele
https://videos.elenarossini.com/a/ele/video-channels
Now, the BEST resource there is for anyone who wants to self-host their own PeerTube is this video by @paige on @fedihost : https://video.fedihost.co/w/63AETQCcEMigzTHTmTu2Wn?start=0s
I wish I had watched it on day 1 (instead of day 3 of my journey), as it would have saved me A LOT of headaches.
The ENTIRE FediHost PeerTube channel is full of gems and I would highly recommend subscribing to it.
And now off I go print out the latest version of the script of my Fediverse video... my interns arrive in a few hours for our first production meeting. Exciteeeed
#EleFediVideos #MySoCalledSudoLife
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my adventures in #selfhosting - day 128 (a bit Clueless edition)
Bonjour Fedi friends!
I'm having a really interesting week: 4 adult caretakers in a house with 3 little children... as I admitted to someone on here, self-hosting is FAR easier than being a referee in fights about LEGOs 
Now, whenever the cousins are busy playing in the garden, I try to do a bit of work, namely: figuring out #PeerTube from the POV of a self-hoster.
Yesterday I finally understood how I could create a user account (other than "root" - the superuser created during the PeerTube installation).
Today I'm busy trying to solve another problem: how do you tell your followers you've moved to a new instance? Because yes, PeerTube is powered by #ActivityPub, but it doesn't support the MOVE function.
I rarely posted on my MakerTube account and only have 150 subscribers, who followed me when reading about it on my blog post about PeerTube.
But I have to admit, the whole "following" thing is really convoluted on PeerTube because you can follow an entire account or specific channels. And I'm a little lost regarding how I notify my followers about the change.
If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears!
Oh and some news for you first... here is my new PeerTube home: https://videos.elenarossini.com/a/ele/video-channels
Special thanks to 
@yunohost
for empowering me to set up my own instance 
#MySoCalledSudoLife #video
The magic of 22
December 22, 2024: I installed #GoToSocial on my Debian VPS thanks to #YunoHost → @elena
February 22, 2025: I installed #Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS using command lines (so many sudo commands!)
April 22, 2025: I upgraded my Debian VPS and installed #PeerTube!
Very excited about this new chapter in my #selfhosting adventures... and I need to find a worthy challenge for June 22 
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 126 (good luck charm edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
Yesterday I flew back to Paris and I’m spending the week at my in-laws' with my extended family… my little one still has one more week of school holidays. Working is a little difficult with so many people around (especially children) but I have a lofty goal for today: upgrading my VPS and installing #PeerTube.
The 22nd of the month has been my good luck charm in my self-hosting adventures. I installed #GoToSocial (this account) via #YunoHost on December 22nd, 2024. I successfully installed #Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS with command lines on February 22, 2025. Because of that, I will be saving 30€/month…
So in the spirit of #FOSS exploration, I find it fitting to upgrade my VPS today on April 22… and - my oh my! - install PeerTube via YunoHost… so that I can self-host my upcoming videos about the Fediverse.
The children are playing in the garden and I have about 30 minutes to do all that. Wish me luck!
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 122 (where is my extra parachute edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
Today is a BIG day, that I've sort of dreaded a bit: my subscription to #Ghost (Pro) ends today, which means that my old Ghost blog will be scheduled for deletion from their servers.
Now my brand new self-hosted Ghost blog (https://news.elenarossini.com) is all that remains. No extra parachutes, gaaaaah.
I already upgraded Ghost versions with command lines and so far so good... I may be taking snapshots of the VPS every few days just to be on the safe side (my provider does automated weekly backups). Yes yes I know I could set something up with Borg backups and I will in due time. I'm still a newbie after all - who knows very little and just copies and pastes commands.
Self-hosting Ghost will save me $25/month! (I was on a $31/month Creator plan). Because I send less than 3,000 emails a month, I am on a free Mailgun plan now. All I'm paying is $5/month for a VPS.
This means that with the money I'm saving I can upgrade my other VPS (it will cost just $2 more a month) to double its RAM and storage... so I can self-host #PeerTube, yay!
In 10 days I will start production of a Fediverse video with my two interns and I definitely want to publish that on my own (future) PeerTube instance. You know, walking the talk and all that.
A HUGE thank you for all your responses yesterday to my post about Bluesky. It blew up and there were so many replies - DOZENS - all very thoughtful and civilized. This is why I appreciate the Fediverse 
Heads-up: I will go offline for the next few hours, so apologies in advance if it takes me a while to respond.
Have a lovely day everyone!
#MySoCalledSudoLife
Good morning Fedi friends!
In case you missed it, on Monday I was able to successfully send a newsletter from my self-hosted, manually installed #Ghost blog. So it appears to be fully working now.
: https://news.elenarossini.com
I don't have any new #selfhosting anecdotes to share. I thought I would be able to relax for a bit and enjoy this milestone. I spent the day yesterday writing a blog post for #TheFutureIsFederated on the topic of resistance to the digital coup.
In the meantime, my 4-year-old spotted some vintage #LEGO panels in the attic. I identified them as belonging to LEGO's King Castle and she demanded I "BUILD IT RIGHT NOW." I'm not even sure I have all the pieces required... I remember that a couple of years ago I found stacks of old LEGO boxes and organized pieces by color in transparent drawers. I found an old manual online for the castle set and so far so good (sort of). I made it to step 10 out of 43. The real test will be building the retractable bridge.
All this to say: no more self-hosting adventures for me this week, I'll be tackling a complex LEGO project (and I can't use code to get out of hurdles...)
#MySoCalledSudoLife #MyLEGOLife
Hello my name is Elena and I'm addicted to #selfhosting.
2 MINUTES after receiving confirmation that my self-hosted Ghost blog is finally working perfectly (newsletter sending included) - something that took 84 DAYS of trial and error and troubleshooting - I've started thinking: "what now?"
Could I be... bored?
Yes.
In a way having a running list of problems to fix was keeping me distracted (by the world at large) and somewhat entertained.
Thank goodness I have another big self-hosting project coming up: #PeerTube.
But maybe I should enjoy this BIG accomplishment for like 5 minutes... or a couple of weeks. No point in installing PeerTube while my 4-year-old has just started a 14 day school holiday. My parents are a huge help but I am basically getting interrupted every 10 minutes... so I can't really dive into something complex 
A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who helped me with Ghost - I owe you big time!!!
Good morning Fedi friends!
I'm finally ready to test if my new self-hosted Ghost blog can withstand the infamous "Mastodon hug of death".
Here's a quick blog post about what I've been up to: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/
(Apparently Mailgun thinks I'm a spammer, so I couldn't send it as a newsletter - that's a whole other story).
Wishing you all a lovely day + weekend 
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 112 (scary Ghost edition) 
Hello Fedi friends!
I'm currently putting the finishing touches to a post on my brand new, self-hosted #Ghost blog (https://news.elenarossini.com).
Very soon, I will test two things:
1) the newsletter integration (hoping everything will run smoothly)
2) the "Mastodon hug of death" - aka I will post a link to it on Mastodon and I will see what happens when the article's preview card will be fetched by hundreds of Fediverse servers.
I need to go pick up my little one from nursery school in 90 minutes so pray for me everything goes smoothly
#MySoCalledSudoLife
Hello Fedi friends! This is a routine reminder that I've just migrated my Ghost blog to a self-hosted instance.
If you follow #TheFutureIsFederated via RSS, please update the feed's URL:
https://news.elenarossini.com/rss/
And if you had bookmarked any of my old posts, they'll still work if you refresh the page... or else just swap "blog" with "news" in the address bar.
This is my proudest moment in #MySoCalledSudoLife as I installed everything with commands. I've learned so much these past 4 months!
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 105 (
edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
I just spent 3 hours tweaking Ghost caching configurations in Terminal. It was a lot of A/B testing, with JSON error messages. I asked for advice on Mastodon, sharing a screenshot of the buggy code and got a solution within ONE minute. I'm just so grateful! 
Now I have "JSON Parser" in my bookmarks bar. What have I become, LOL? Honestly, I'm having so much fun learning all this.
Anyway, I was successfully able to change the caching maxAge from 0 to... 600. I'm hoping that when I share a link to my new self-hosted blog on Mastodon, the whole VPS won't go down within seconds (as it happened multiple times over the past week).
So, trying out a little experiment here because on GoToSocial I have fewer followers. Here is my self-hosted Ghost blog, my pride and joy (and source of occasional headaches). Let me know if it works for you:
https://news.elenarossini.com
Wishing you all a lovely day!
#MySoCalledSudoLife
Good morning Fedi friends!
I had to delete the toot I published earlier because sharing a URL to my new self-hosted Ghost blog overwhelmed the server & took the whole site down (even with powerful caching in place).
This is apparently a common problem: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662#event-12625986130
Anyway! I spent the past few months learning some basic coding & I was able to manually install Ghost, edit Nginx configs & do other dev magic. It's super empowering! 
As they say: link in bio
About to install Varnish on my Ubuntu VPS - wish me luck!
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 101 (perseverance edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
I'm putting the finishing touches to a blog post about #PeerTube - from the POV of creators. I look forward to publishing it soon so I can devote the rest of the day to fixing my self-hosted Ghost blog issues.
Yes yes yes I know I keep going back-and-forth on this, so I apologize for the "flip-flopping" but I recently got an amazing shout out on a Fediverse podcast... but that shout-out mentioned my self-hosting woes so as I matter of pride I wanna fix them with code. I'm not done yet! I'm a fighter by nature.
I rebuilt my entire Ghost blog (33 posts and counting) from scratch TWO TIMES this year. After stepping away from the problem for 5 days, I'm ready to dive back in.
Disabling the Mastodon preview cards (for links) would fix all my problems but first I wanna see what happens when I tweak my NGINX config file.
I'm in the self-hosting game for the LONG HAUL! Undeterred, ready to learn. Let's do this.
(And THANK YOU FOR YOUR AMAZING SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT throughout all my stumbles).
Wishing you all a lovely Friday.
#MySoCalledSudoLife
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 100 (milestones edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
Today I'm filled with gratitude as I think back about all the ways I have changed - and become more empowered - since I installed @yunohost on my VPS on December 17, 2024.
The biggest difference is my state of mind. For example, yesterday I started using #PeerTube, after setting up an account on the instance MakerTube. I am enjoying it IMMENSELY. I uploaded a couple of my videos there but then immediately thought: I should set up my own instance!
If you had told me 4 months ago that one day I would be a couple of clicks away from setting up my own PeerTube, I would have thought you were hallucinating. But #YunoHost has given me this power and confidence – for which I am infinitely grateful.
Since early February 2025 I have also gotten a bit of experience installing things on a separate VPS with command lines. Even if my self-hosted Ghost blog has given me lemons so far (Mastodon Hug of Death, you're to blame for this!) I am undeterred. I will try tweaking my NGINX settings next week, to set up a reverse proxy and increase my cache. Or heck, I could block Mastodon preview card requests and all my problems would go away. (If someone knows how to do that, please let me know!)
100 days of self-hosting, wow! I feel like a completely different person. Digital sovereignty rocks.
What are my goals for the next 100 days?
1) solving my self-hosted Ghost blog troubles
2) getting an education in caching, reverse proxies and the like
3) setting up my PeerTube instance
Thank you for encouraging me to go on this journey and for all your incredible advice and generous offers to help. This is truly the best community
#MySoCalledSudoLife #YunoHost
Good morning Fedi friends!
It's been 99 days since I started self-hosting my own Fediverse instances. Crazy how time flies!
I've been a bit absent from here this week because I started exploring the world of #PeerTube from the POV of a creator.
I just set up my own account on #MakerTube - so that I can write a guide that is accessible to many (as opposed to skipping this step and going straight to self-hosting).
Anyway, here is my PeerTube account: https://makertube.net/a/elena/video-channels
I have been able to follow it from #Mastodon and #Friendica without a problem, but I keep getting an error message when I try to subscribe with my #GoToSocial username. The exact message: "Cannot fetch information from this remote account." Does anybody have the same issue? (as in: people on GoToSocial, can you subscribe to PeerTube channels?)
Wishing you all a lovely day 
P.S.: about to go offline for the rest of the day because... there's no pre-school in France on Wednesdays and the garderie keeps my little one up until 12:30. So apologies in advance if I'm slow to reply to messages.
#MySoCalledSudoLife
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 97 (tiramisu edition) 
Good morning Fedi friends!
If you read my toots this weekend, you may be familiar with the onslaught of issues I faced with my self-hosted Ghost blog.
The short version is: as soon as I unveiled its URL, I started to edit old toots in Mastodon - updating articles with the new address of my blog. Problem was: those toots were quite popular, with over 150 shares and hundreds of likes. I experienced the "Mastodon Hug of Death" AKA dozens of independent servers trying to fetch the blog preview image... which immediately overwhelmed my VPS and made it go offline. So my new visitors were very confused and immediately reported that the URL of my new blog didn't work. All this because I had failed to set up a cache / reverse proxy. Aw the things you learn!
I was feeling pretty dejected on Saturday about this whole ordeal but when I woke up on Sunday (see previous toot in this chain) I recaptured my fighting spirit. I thought: I put so much work into this blog - like, really - I cannot possibly give up now. So I resolved to add a CDN to it to help with incoming requests / traffic.
This was yesterday - aka Sunday - aka a day I'm supposed to spend offline with my husband and child. Every time they went off to play a game, I had 10 precious minutes to try something. And friends, my attempts got squashed all over again in the worst possible way.
I tried BunnyCDN first. Very easy and fast to set up, even if the onboarding is missing key information. My site was cached by them super quickly but then I had to delete ALL my DNS records otherwise I couldn't add a CNAME config to it - it was conflicting with all my DNS records for the subdomain.
Fine! I did that even if it meant deleting TXT records linked to the Mailgun newsletter. "I'll deal with that later" I thought. (And yes, deleting them was necessary otherwise the DNS panel wouldn't allow me to add a CNAME).
With the CNAME added I kept getting a 508 loop error, I reached out to support, they answered super quickly but didn't give me instructions about how to do things correctly. It was all very confusing, assuming I was an advanced sysadmin. So after 3 emails with them I gave up. I deleted the setup, went back and re-created my DNS records but then the SSL certificate was broken. Ouf. I thought: certainly I just have to wait for DNS records to propagate. And that was the case this morning (HUGE sigh of relief).
Then I tried Cloudflare (yikes, didn't want to) just to see if the setup was easier and saw right off the bat that I couldn't add a subdomain... they require a top level domain even though my TLD is linked to a self-hosted Wordpress site on my hosting provider, whereas the subdomain is linked to a VPS with a totally different IP address.
My self-hosting confidence has taken the worst beating EVER but I'm 3 days away from celebrating 100 days of self-hosting. So I will try one last resort: editing NGINX records to set up caching that way. And/or reverse proxy, I'm not really sure what this all means but I will try. @fhekland sent me this great link: https://scotthelme.co.uk/caching-ghost-with-nginx/
I just need to step away from this for a day or two because this whole ordeal was a major letdown. I called this update the "tiramisu" edition because in Italian tiramisu means "pull me up" / "cheer me up."
Silver lining: I now have a life hack for handling situations like these. I need to keep a to do list with simple techie tasks I can solve... to restore a sense of accomplishment during challenging times. Like: everything may be bad, but at least I did ___.
THANK YOU for the dozens of messages you sent me this weekend, sorry I was mostly offline with my family and will try to reply to each one of you now.
Wishing you a great week!
#MySoCalledSudoLife
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 96 (fighter edition)
You know what? If my daughter in the future came to me for advice, describing a situation similar to what I experienced with my self-hosted Ghost woes, I would tell her: you should persevere.
Adding a CDN / setting up a reverse proxy requires so little time compared to all the work up to this point.
Fedi friends I’m going with option B.
Yes it’s ridiculous that my new self-hosted Ghost blog cannot handle something as simple as an edited Mastodon toot - whose preview card would suddenly overwhelm my VPS.
What’s even more ridiculous? Spending over 20 hours of work recreating 36 blog posts (twice!), migrating hundreds of members, having a beautiful site I fully control… and giving this up at the first struggle because I don’t wanna set up a CDN.
I will try do it tomorrow and if that fails, I will be at peace with my decision. I choose to fight for another day
And THANK YOU for all your supportive messages and brilliant advice yesterday. I will reply to you individually once my child is back in pre-school. I can only type these messages when she’s asleep and she just woke up.
Wishing you all a lovely Sunday
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 95 part 2, white flag edition 
I turned my self-hosted Ghost blog private (for now) while I figure out reverse proxy / cache solutions for it.
It's absolutely ridiculous that the whole VPS would get overwhelmed by links to it shared on Mastodon.
Yesterday was a bit of a nightmare. I announced the new URL, tweaked an old toot to update the URL of a popular pinned article about PeerTube (pointing to my new self-hosted blog) and because the link had a preview card that servers had to fetch, the VPS immediately went offline. So people reading my announcement immediately reported they couldn't access the site. So embarrassing.
I'll plan to spend the weekend reflecting on the next steps.
Solution A: staying on my Ghost(Pro) plan which right now looks like a great deal for the money (considering all the features they offer, the lack of stress on my end and the superb customer support). Self-hosting would save me 5 dollars a month at best if I factor in a VPS, Mailgun newsletter integration and a CDN.
Am I so cheap that I will go through all this stress and uncertainty to save 5 dollars a month? Methinks not.
I just have a bruised ego because I literally spent 20+ hours moving the blog and I even started over from scratch twice. Yes I did the whole thing TWICE. First time around I found out at the last second the YunoHost installation was on mariaDB and no longer supported by the official Ghost team. Support had stopped 2 years ago even! So I signed up for a new VPS, installed everything from scratch with command lines... and the second I debuted the new thing, the VPS went offline because of a Mastodon toot with 100+ boosts. Who would have thought? The whole endeavor feels really cursed.
Solution B: figuring out reverse proxy / caching solutions... with no guarantees that a popular toot on Mastodon won't take down my whole VPS.
You can see where I'm leaning.
Aw the joys and pains of self-hosting! Lesson learned: sometimes a managed hosting solution can be a great investment and give you peace of mind.
my adventures in #selfhosting - day 95
Saturday morning, I naturally wake up at 6:20am (as usual) and proceed to spend almost an hour researching reverse proxies, caching utilities and CDNs for my self-hosted Ghost blog… to prevent the “Mastodon Hug of Death”.
I’m now scared at the idea of sharing a link to my blog that comes with a preview card, because it’s like I’m “DDOS’ing” my own site (words from someone’s blog about this issue, sorry I can’t properly quote them).
I thought that once my site was up and running, it would be smooth sailing from there. Aw how naive I was 
It’s worth pointing out that I have 3 Wordpress sites - all federated - and even when I share blog posts that get popular on Mastodon, I never run into server issues. So this is a little moment of gratitude for my web host, its native CDN and my Wordpress caching plugin. Ouf. This self-hosted Ghost blog is a little cursed I tell you!
I still have a paid Ghost(Pro) plan and I’m having serious second thoughts about keeping it / dumping this whole self-hosted thing. Again.
It’s not a good feeling to be afraid that a popular blog post could take my whole site down… especially when I’m away from my computer (aka half the day, when I’m with my child) or when I’m asleep. This never happened on my Ghost (Pro) plan, even when I had 100+ boosts on a blog post.
Silver lining: I’m learning new things.
Oh and I don’t mean to be a downer on a Saturday morning. I’m sorry. On the upside, I’m super grateful for all your supportive messages, your bug reports and your links to solutions. This is truly the best community