2020-04-04-static-alternatives-to-mastodon-and-gitea.en.md (2694B)
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2 title = "Static Alternatives to Mastodon and Gitea"
3 date = 2020-04-04
4 slug = "static-alternatives-to-mastodon-and-gitea"
5 draft = false
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8 Like how I decided to switch off Wordpress, I think I've had enough running Mastodon and Gitea.
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10 Keeping up with configuration changes with Gitea had been annoying, whereas with
11 Mastodon, breakages are common due the mismatching system library versions
12 (mostly protobuf) in the dependencies. While the latter is not a fault of
13 Mastodon itself, having to install two package managers (for Ruby and Node.js,
14 respectively) just to run a program is rather ridiculous to me.
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16 I started hosting both applications in 2018: Mastadon first as a replacement for
17 Twitter, and Gitea later in reaction to Microsoft's acquisition of
18 Github. Looking back, they were probably overkill for my needs: my primary use
19 case for a git server and a micro blog are both very much single-user focused
20 and write-only, which means these content should be available in read-only form
21 for my site's visitors, making static pages the perfect replacement for both web
22 front ends.
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24 Starting with Mastadon, I'm using the [twtxt](https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) format to store and serve my micro
25 blog. The format has existed for some time now, but enjoyed a recent resurgence
26 in the tildeverse (a series of websites offering public access Unix-like
27 systems). While there is now a whole community supported ecosystem of various
28 syntax extensions and software seeking to add more features to the format, I
29 have found the barebone timestamp-tab-and-then-text syntax to be sufficient. The
30 write-and-forget cycle is really addicting, and even more so when using a
31 command line client (mine is aptly named [twixter](https://git.shimmy1996.com/twixter/)).
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33 As for Gitea, while an excellent Github replacement in my opinion, is more
34 suitable for community collaboration than as a personal project dumping
35 ground. I opted to manage the git repositories directly (see Chapter [4.4](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Setting-Up-the-Server) and [4.5](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon)
36 of _Pro Git_), and use [stagit](https://git.codemadness.org/stagit/) to generate the corresponding HTML files. These
37 stagit-generated pages have replaced Gitea as the new [Trantor Holocron](https://git.shimmy1996.com/).
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39 Now that I have found satisfactory solution for the write-only portion of my
40 online presence, I will continue to explore options for the remaining two
41 pillars: read-only (content consumption) and interaction (means of
42 communication). Web feeds and email are my best answers now, but they still
43 don't cover all the bases in my experience.