While I usually use a VPN in public places like cafes, I don’t always do on networks I trust more, like my home or University. Nearly all of my network traffic is encrypted thanks to HTTPS, so my DNS requests are the only plaintext data I sent out in the wild.

I’ve been using DNS-over-TLS (DoT) on my Android phone for nearly 2 years thanks to Android’s native DoT support since version 9. After doing a little bit of research a while ago, I thought it would be a hassle to use an encrypted DNS protocol on my MacBook, but it turns out to be very simple.

This month I decided to donate to the Peertube crowfunding campain, in order to make possible a future with a usable alternative to YouTube.

What is Peertube? Let me quote Framasoft:

PeerTube is a software anyone can install on a server, to get a data-friendly video-hosting platform, called a PeerTube Instance. PeerTube combines:

○ A free-libre license, that guarantees code transparency and legally allows you to use and contribute to the software;

I’m a big fan of federated social networks since I discovered Diaspora* in 2015. They have a whole other feel than classic, centralized social networks, which goal is to get as much data and engagement on their platform as possible.

Federated networks are cool. As you may expect, the majority of the people there are interested in technology and IT in general. On the fediverse (e.g. Mastodon, Pleroma, GNU/Social), I talk about this most of the time, and also about anime which happens to be pretty big here too. Of course you can talk about whatever you want and there are much more communities.

One year ago, was the big Mastodon “boom”. A lot of French people like me signed up on mastodon.social and discovered this new social network.

Actually I signed up 2 months before but didn’t use it before the wave of April. I already did a little review of my year here, but I wanted to make a quick post to immortalize this big milestone.

So as mastodon.social was dying under the load, me and a lot of other people decided to create new instances to welcome new users, because that’s the point of a federated social network.

In this tutorial, we will install a diaspora* pod on a Debian/Ubuntu server. I use the official Debian 8 guide as a base, and I used it myself on Debian 9 for dspr.io, but it should work on most recent Debian and Ubuntu versions.

Our setup will use Nginx, PostgreSQL and Systemd.

Table of content

• Hardware requirements
• Installation
  • Dependencies
  • PostgreSQL
  • Creating the diaspora user
  • Ruby installation
  • Install exim4
  • Download diaspora*
  • Configure diaspora*
  • Install bundle and the gems
  • Setup the database
  • Precompile assets
  • Systemd services
  • Nginx reverse proxy
  • Logrotate
  • Admin stuff
• Update diaspora*
• Backup
• Enjoy!

Hardware requirements

Obviously, they depend on the size of your instance and the activity of the users.

Yep. One year.

I wanted to make this post just to commemorate this.

A year ago, I stumbled upon mastodon.social, yet another decentralized social network and I was like:

Hey this looks good.

But… that’s about it. I’m a heavy Twitter and Tweetdeck user so the interface was familiar to me. That’s great, but what’s the point if it’s empty? I saw some GNU/Social people (I was myself using quitter.se from time to time), but that’s about it.