elfLand(.us)

Well this has been a long time in the making. A long time ago "The Idea" was to have elfLand(.me) be my blog, and elfLand(.us) be a part of The Fediverse (also some DNS shenanigans, because I can). The idea being to run all my stuff Open and IndieWeb.

The Original idea was Diaspora, and I even threw in on the KickStarter, but didn't like the way the protocol went. I kicked around the idea of running Mastodon, and I may yet. WordPress got an ActivityPub Plugin, and I played with that for a few weeks until I remembered how much I despise actually using WordPress.

I looked at Friendica and the feature list and it pretty much hit all my wants and needs. It's PHP (like 90% of everything else I run), small footprint (until media starts getting added) and it's reasonably not ugly. It's got much in the way of protocol support and  it'll do XML-RPC (and I'm going to see if I can hammer that into this Backdrop CMS and build nodes from Fedi Posts). Another nice thing is that it cheerfully plays nice with my favorite Phone App, FediLab (have the Pro version), which is Multi Account so I can post to my mstdn.social as well. And I found a theme that's decent ... it looks like Mastodon in fact.

More on this as I find features and bugs.

Now, all of this is to get back to IndieWeb and Self Hosting concepts, and I'm using all Open Source, naturally.

There's a few NextCloud components I can leverage too... but some of that's not done baking yet. 

Oh, this took less time and much less heart burn than WordPress and ActivityPub.

Still haven't fixed the login page ... but really I want the home page show global community. More reading the docs.