Post by @algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 4 hr. ago

I was just reminded of something: since I self host pretty much everything, if shit hits the fan, and my homelab goes down... how do people reach me? And how do I reach people?

I'll need to think of backup accounts.

I do have a phone (so calling & SMS work), and Signal, but I'm not comfortable giving out my phone number, and Signal severely limits who can contact me, and who I can contact. I need other options. A backup account on a respectable Fedi server, for example.

I'm... I'm not sure I need a backup email, because my outgoing mail is not self hosted, so I can always send email. And if shit hits the fan, I can send email asking the recipient to contact me in other ways.

Basically, what I'm thinking about is:

Which fedi server should I have a backup account on? Which one allows such, to begin with? Ideally, I'm looking for a server with no open registration - invite-only or requiring approval.
What other forms of contact options should I have?

10 Replies

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Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 4 hr. ago

I mean, I have phone & sms for close friends & family. That's t aken care of.

I can send email, even if my infra goes down, so contacts with whom I usually communicate over email are also fine. Granted, their reply won't arrive, but if need be, I can ask them to contact me via other means temporarily.

A backup Fedi account, which I can put in my bio here would help me put the word out that that crawlers didn't eat me, our dog just ate all the ethernet cables.

But it feels like I'm missing something. Hm. Maybe a kind of status page hosted somewhere else, where I could put up a "shit's down, will be up at some point, don't worry" note. Then again, a Fedi account kinda doubles as that?

Except some.server.example/@algernon is far less memorable than - say - wtf-is-up-with-algernon.neocities.org.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 3 hr. ago

A'ight. For an emergency backup web presence, I think neocities is pretty much perfect: free, can update it from my browser, friends and family can remember $something.neocities.org.

Gotta figure out the $something. algernon is taken, and I don't necessarily want it to be algernon-shaped either. Or, I dunno. Maybe I do want algernon-shaped, but only shaped. But also something not too long, but still uniquely algernon.

HAH! I KNOW!

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 3 hr. ago

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hr. ago

~3 more replies

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hr. ago

Eh. I need to increase the number of profile fields, because I used all 6, and I don't want to remove any of them!

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 38 min. ago

I might need to trim the accounts on my Tuba. With all the recent bots, and the alt / backup / emergency account, it's a long list.

And somehow my main isn't at the top, @campsis_radicans is.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 29 min. ago

I wonder what kind of sorting is in place there. It's not the order which I added the accounts. It's not alphabethical. It's not domains then usernames. It's not the internal UUID by the looks of it (the UUID of my main is the 6th in the list, yet, is displayed second).

Maybe I should look at the source.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 17 min. ago

Mmmngh. Nah. I'm not that interested in sorting them.

(Especially since I'm still on Tuba 0.9, because newer versions have changed some UI elements and cutoffs and whatnot in ways I don't like, and it's easier to stick to 0.9 than to patch it.)

a very weeny construct 💀

@pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website 4 hr. ago

@algernon i think "a fedi account somewhere else" isn't great, as it's difficult to discover

thought i read somewhere that you rent a super cheap vps for proxy purposes?

if i were building this it'd be a simple vps hosted web form that writes submissions to a file

what about bots stuffing the form? simple length limit, store compressed, abuse logrotate, maybe just write to systemd journal

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 4 hr. ago

@pho4cexa I can put the alt fedi account in my bio on this account, and on the "emergency website". That should be sufficient discoverability for my needs, I think.

I don't want Yet Another VPS, because that doesn't help in the disaster scenario where my provider suspends my account.

A VPS at another provider could help, but... if I get hit by a car and noone pays the bill, and my VPSes get shut down, then I'm screwed. If I'm out for ~two weeks at the wrong time, that's Trouble. While I do have ample documentation about how to take over my infra & run it, someone would need to read and understand it, and unless I'm dead, noone in my family & close circle will take over.

If I'm dead, I no longer care, it's my family's task then to figure out what to do with my shit. O:)

In short, what I'm looking for is something hosted by someone else, because then keeping it up is not my resposibility. O:)