Stanclift Supplimental
Monday, February 24, 2025
I’ve been pretty consistent about taking vitamins and such for 15 years. I go through periods where I’m more serious about it, and sometimes just keep it simple.
Fedi Summer
Monday, July 3, 2023
The following is an email sent to all vmst.io members on July 3, 2023. Before you swipe left on this message, allow me to clarify that I’ve considered for a long time whether to send an email to all of you. I deeply respect your privacy and understand that you didn’t provide us with your email to subscribe to a newsletter. Whether you joined yesterday or nine months ago, we’ve only ever used your email for account alerts.
Micro.blog
Monday, May 22, 2023
After decommissioning the vmst.io WriteFreely instance last week, I moved my blog back to Ghost. But then this weekend I remembered what an absolute shit experience writing or editing on a mobile device is with Ghost. A few people mentioned that they just don’t blog from mobile, but I like to be able to do all my work from as many devices as possible (I push vmst.io updates from my phone just because I can.
Sleep Apnea
Monday, May 22, 2023
I went to an ENT a few weeks ago because I have been getting tonsil stones for a few years now, especially bad in the winter months. He said “yep your tonsils need to come out, this is going to be terrible, plan to be out for at least a week” 😯 That adventure is now scheduled for the week of June 26. While I’m there I also mentioned that I snore really badly at night.
Write(less)Freely
Sunday, May 21, 2023
On Friday, the vmst.io team made the decision today to sunset our WriteFreely offering for vmst.io members. Since launching in January we've only had 23 users create blogs, of which only 12 users ever generated any content, many of which were a single post. In total we had about two users aside from myself that used it with any frequency. My usage was mostly to justify it's continued existance. Because WriteFreely requires a MySQL database backend (all our other services use Postgres) the costs of keeping the service operational outweighed the benefits to our members.
Classic Ordering
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Elan Hasson asked in a Matrix chat group of Mastodon admins how he should go back and watch classic Star Trek. It got me thinking about a list of episodes to help jumpstart your knowledge without having to watch every Original Series episode (of which some haven't aged super well, or are confusing to new viewers in the context of modern Trek.) Here's the list that I came up with:
Netlify More
Saturday, April 15, 2023
We’ve been using Netlify for the docs.vmst.io site for a while now, but it wasn’t until recently I realized it could be used for other things that we host. I’ve now successfully moved: element.vmst.io, our Element Web portal for accessing Matrix. elk.vmst.io, our Elk alternative web client for Mastodon. semaphore.vmst.io, our Semaphore alternative web client for Mastodon.This means fewer Docker containers and custom build operations are needed to maintain these deployments.
Instance Purge
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
This morning I removed just over 3000 dead instance connections from vmst.io. I know Mastodonizens don’t follow their follower accounts as closely as some folks on other networks, but I wanted to let you know you this operation might have caused some go missing in this purge. These are instances that have quit responding for at least seven days, and in some cases they haven’t been around since November. A couple weeks ago I saw an uptick in the amount of SSL errors in Sidekiq communicating with various remote instances and noticed a trend of instances that were stood up around 90 days ago, with Let’s Encrypt certificates, that have since been abandoned.
Blue Green
Monday, February 27, 2023
I've doing some blue/green (maybe it's just A/B) testing on vmst.io this week with server updates and Mastodon dependency testing. Specifically focused on some upgraded versions of Nginx and Puma (which are now fully live for everyone) and some backend libraries for the streaming API to things like Redis and Postgres. I've been rolling out more updates this way, since things are pretty happy and functional with multiple systems running each component.
Virtually Federated
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
I've been doing things with computers, since last October. In addition to launching a Mastodon instance at vmst.io I've since launched an integrated WriteFreely platform at write.vmst.io. As a result I will be blogging there regularly from now on. The vmstan.com site will remain here for the time being, until I can maybe migrate the content into WriteFreely. https://write.vmst.io/vmstanhttps://vmst.io/@vmstanhttps://whois.vmstan.com
January Infrastructure
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
One of my core beliefs about Mastodon and the Fediverse is that there needs to be transparency in the operations of the various projects and instances. This includes transparency in both the financial and technical operations of the instance. For the financial piece, we have a single source of truth on our Funding page that has total income from memberships as well as monthly/yearly expectations of expenses. We'll be providing a more granular update here soon that shows exactly where we are in terms of free cash flow.
December Infrastructure
Thursday, December 15, 2022
I wanted to provide a round-up of some changes to the vmst.io infrastructure since it went live last month. No More CloudflareOur domain had always been registered and DNS provided through Cloudflare. For a brief period I was testing their WAF (web application firewall) service with the site but this led to more problems than perceived benefits. The sentiment within the Fediverse is generally negative towards Cloudflare, although many other instances use them.
Registration Numbers
Thursday, December 8, 2022
I’ve had a few thoughts rattling around about registration numbers on vmst.io, vs instances that are generally wide open. The instance officially went live on October 6, but didn’t let anyone else join until a few weeks after. We are listed on joinmastodon.org so we definitely see more random user signups than instances that just rely on word-of-toot. Because we ask folks to "apply" for their account here rather than just signup without moderation, we get maybe 1/10th the number of registrations you’d see in somewhere else.
November Infrastructure
Monday, November 28, 2022
This post is a rollup and expansion of a set of Toots around the new vmst·io infrastructure that went live on the morning of Wednesday, November 23, 2022. When I launched vmst·io at the start of October, it was intended to just be a personal instance. mastodon.technology had just announced it's pending closure, and I wanted to see what it was like to own my own corner of the Fediverse.
Interested in trying into an alternative to Twitter? Mastodon is a federated and decentralized social network with over 8,000 different active instances. I’m running vmst.io, which is open for signups. No ads or algorithms. Join us.
If you’re interested in moving to Mastodon, or just want to dip your toes in the water, if you ask nice and you’re not a jerk you can maybe join my instance.
In the tradition of complaining about social networks in other social networks I’d like to comment that my preferred Mastodon instance is currently down. 🐘
I’m slowly learning to just embrace the suck.
I’m sure this is just a total coincidence and has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world aspr.hhs.gov/newsroom/Pages…
Still Here
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Honestly just making sure my site still works 🤭 Considering the news of the day, maybe I'll just blog more.