Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

kushal76uaid62oup5774umh654scnu5dwzh4u2534qxhcbi4wbab3ad.onion

Two new federated services for dgplug

Last week we started providing two new services for the dgplug members.

Mastodon service at toots

Having our own instance was in the plan for time in my head. I had personal Mastodon account before, but, that instance went down and never tried to find a new home. This time, I think if a few of us (the sys-admins from the group) use this as a regular thing for ourselves, it will be much easier to maintain than depending on someone else.

Any regular dgplug member can get an invite link for the instance by joining the IRC channel and asking for the same.

Blogging platform

In our summer training, we spend much time talking about communication, a significant part is focused on blogging. We suggest https://wordpress.com as a starting place to the newcomers. At the same time, we found that some people had trouble as they were more focused on the themes or other options than writing regularly.

I looked at https://write.as before, but as I saw https://people.kernel.org is now running on WriteFreely, I thought of giving it a try. The UI is much more straightforward, and as it uses Markdown by default, that is a plus point for our use case. Though most of this year’s participants already have their own blogs, we don’t have many people at the beginning, which helps as not too many support requests to us.

Just like the Mastodon instance, if you need a home for your blogs, come over to our IRC channel #dgplug on Freenode server, and ask for an account.

backup of the systems

This is the biggest question in providing the services in my mind. We set up the very initial backup systems, and we will see in the coming weeks how it stands. Maybe, we will take down the services, and try to restore everything from backup, and see how it goes.

Btw, if you want to follow me over Mastodon, then I am available at https://toots.dgplug.org/@kushal