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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.