It’s been one hell of a year, but we’re still here.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve just wanted to shut this down, create an account on Lemmy World, and do my shitposting there without all the pesky responsibilities that come with running an instance.

For better or worse, I’ve powered through and have finally achieved some semblance of balance in my life where I don’t have to babysit this thing constantly or have to fully rely on my insomniac buddy to be a backup admin (she still helps out, just doesn’t need to all the time anymore). Rough estimates show I have about 93% of the sanity I started with this time last year lol.

Looking Forward

At this point, I’m pretty committed to continuing on with federated platforms. They’re still interesting, and I’m trying to be part of the change I want to see in the world. I also think we’ve ridden through the roughest patches, so things should only get better as the various ecosystems, the tools to manage them, and their interoperability mature.

Sublinks Migration

At some point, we will be switching to Sublinks for the backend rather than Lemmy. I don’t have a full transition plan in place yet, but it should be transparent as Sublinks aims to be 1:1 API compatible with Lemmy’s API (meaning all the apps should ‘just work’).

There’s no date set on this, and I’ll likely run through several test iterations before switching. I’m also not yet sure if Sublinks can drop in under the same domain without breaking federation or if it will need to live under a subdomain (will have to check in on the project status to confirm). Again, the transition plan is not yet finalized, but the goal is to do this seamlessly or run them in parallel until eventually sunsetting Lemmy.

You can learn more about Sublinks here: https://sublinks.org/

Additional Services/Platforms

We’ve recently upgraded our fiber connection and storage server, so it’s now possible to offer some additional services that were not possible before.

Invidious or Piped

Both Piped and Invidious are alternate YouTube frontends that focus on removing Google’s tracking and invasive ads. Currently, if you use our main UI, you can select either of those as your preferred player for YouTube links, but they’re all instances run by volunteers and frequently bogged down. I’m not yet sure which I want to run here (still evaluating both), but I plan to set up one of them and make it an option for use in the main Tesseract UI.

Peertube

Peertube is like a self-hosted YouTube. Rather than being a frontend for YT, it actually handles the videos, conversion/transcoding, embedding, etc itself. Our main UI, Tesseract, has support for Peertube, so videos can be embedded directly.

I don’t really have a use-case for Peertube yet; it’s just cool and I want to play with it. At first, it’ll probably just mirror some channels from elsewhere, but I also envision it being a place to share videos you may want to post on Lemmy/Sublinks. So, hoping to post/see some cool GoPro footage from various adventures, drives through scenic towns, or whatever interesting video content you may want to share.

Suggestions

Quite a few other instances run other federated services like Pixelfed (Instagram alternative, I think?) or Mastodon alongside Lemmy. I’ve never been big on microblogging and don’t really Instagram, either, but if there’s interest, I would be open to considering setting up either/both of those.