I Broke Mastodon, Playing with GoToSocial and More Fediverse Updates

As you may have seen from one of my previous posts, I tried to set up my on Mastodon server. While it worked for a short while, due to factors such as not knowing Ruby very well (the programming language used to build Mastodon) and trying to maintain work-life balance.

This post acts as a follow-on from this.

Basically, my instance no longer works. Ever since I updated my server to the latest version, the web UI stopped working, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what has gone wrong. I spent many hours reading log files in detail and Googling the issue to pinpoint the error, with not much success. Let this be a warning for those who would like to set up their own Mastodon instance.

As I said before, I know very little Ruby (which probably doesn’t help my case) and, due to there not being enough hours in the day, I don’t plan on learning it any time soon. And so, rather than try and fix it, it decided to look for alternatives.

As I’m a huge fan of the fantastic Go programming language, naturally GoToSoical took my appeal. It’s essentially a headless version of Mastodon without the frontend. This isn’t too much of an issue as it uses the Mastodon API, which should (in theory) work with most Mastodon clients.

Compared with Mastodon, it has been much easier to set up although, it is worth flagging that it is still in alpha and should expect bugs. For example, some of the issues I’ve experienced include:

  • Not being able to process follow request
  • Not able to federate fast enough
  • Issues with some posts not being visible

It’s possible that some of these issues may be down to problems with the ActivityPub protocol, however I can see that others have had success with getting GoToSocial up and running. I just don’t understand what I have done differently.

If you are a GoToSocial dev, I would love to hear from you. I really want to get back into the Fediverse again through my own self-hosted server.

My instance can be found at gts.jrashford.com.