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Episode: 998
Title: HPR0998: Viva la Federation!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0998/hpr0998.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:09:25
---
Hello, this is Wendigo, and this is NY Bill, and we're going to talk a little bit about
our experiences with the status net micro blogging software.
First of all, if you've never used it, status net is a micro blogging service, a little
bit like Twitter, but it's a federated service.
And I know we're going to get in trouble with some of the members of our audience for
using that particular term.
But all that means is really it, you can set up your own server and connect to all the
other status net servers out there.
It's federated, distributed, however you like.
And it's lost, too.
Absolutely.
It's all free software, and the most popular instance I know of is Identica.
That should be the one people are familiar with if they've ever heard of it at all.
We were all on Identica before this, and part of the reason we started, everybody started,
not really, I don't want to say jumping ship, but Identica had some growing pains there
for a while.
And when Identica started having its issues, I think that's when most of us started investigating
the distributed nature of the service.
Yep, their 1.0 release came out with a whole bunch of new features, which took them
a little while to get hammered out.
And then there was some server issues, they moved to a new data center, there was reports
of a DDoS attack, yeah, it had some issues.
And we say there were, but I think some of them, they're not nearly as frequent, but some
of them are still going on a little bit.
Every once in a while, the feds as we call them, the federated users, we will lose contact
with Identica completely, we'll stop getting status updates from that service, and a couple
hours later they'll just kick back in.
Yep, that happened the other day.
Yeah, so I thought we'd start out with your experiences, Bill, about setting up your
own instances or using the service at all, from Identica side or status net with your
own instance.
I was kind of a late-comer to Identica, it took me like a year to get over there, because
I hung out in forums mostly, but Identica felt like IRC that I could leave a message for,
IRC feels very immediate to me, you're sitting right, it's like a phone call, the people
are in the room with you, and I always feel a little bit awkward, like, okay, I'm leaving
now if I only stick around, anyways, I did take to Identica, and then when it started
having issues, you guys started setting up status net instances.
Yeah, that's about when I started investigating myself.
I got on to yours first.
Yeah, you set up an account on my fragtive instance, and then shortly after investigated
the possibility of setting up your own.
Yeah, because I was just interested, I've never done much outward facing networking, I've
never had a blog or a web page, well I had this little web page, but that doesn't even
count, it wasn't my server, so that was just interesting, figuring out the lamp stack
stuff.
Yeah, you've never hosted your own stuff.
Nope, so I got a lot of help from you, Feds.
Yeah, and I'm going to get into that a little bit when I hit my story, but I think that's
one of the best parts about status net, the support network there.
Well, it's just like the Linux community, I mean, it's all cool people.
Yeah, that's a great parallel actually.
All right, so my first step was getting a domain, I've never had a domain.
So I checked all the registrars, I went with Gandhi, Jezra suggested Gandhi, so gun monkey
was taken, gun monkey that everything, but I got gun monkey net.net, so that was step
one.
You would think they wouldn't trifle with someone who wants to name gunmonkey.com, or
they'll watch me very closely.
And I had to free up a laptop, I got an old Pentium M that was kicking around, and I
erased that through crunch bang on it.
Did you ever use the post install script for crunch bang?
Oh, when you start up, it prompts you with a bunch of stuff.
Yeah, I had never used that because I was using statlers, I don't know, alpha or beta,
I just kept upgrading.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of crunch bang.
He did a fantastic job on those scripts.
Yeah, I hadn't seen it before, and then it pops up, and it's stepping through, and I'm
thinking, or I'm going to make this into like a web server, so I'm going to need the
lamp stack.
And then one of the questions was, do you want the lamp stack?
I go, yes, I do, Phil, and I press yes, and then it all comes in, I go, wow, he just
handled it all for me.
Yep, if anybody listening knows Philip Newbro, you know he's a wizard.
So then I pulled in the status net software and installed that, and I have to say in about
10 minutes it was like up and running, it wasn't configured, but I had like a web page
I could visit.
And here's a little hint if anybody is going to install it.
I did everything in the config files and didn't realize until like weeks later that there's
just a button on the GUI that says configure, and it's all like point and click, and I was
in there like typing, typing, so.
One of the strange parts I've encountered in status net is there is a great GUI component.
There's a big admin screen that lets you set up things like the file paths, what plugins
you want to enable, and it works for half of this stuff.
And then you have to manually edit the configuration file for some of it.
Which I didn't really have a problem, you know, editing config files, it was just also new
to me.
I was like a little lost, asking a lot of questions on what to do next.
Yeah, and that support network comes in.
When I first installed mine, I was in the status net IRC channel, and there were extremely
helpful people there.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but is it Parlementum?
Parlementum?
Yeah.
It's one of them.
Yeah.
Whoever those guys are, there was the guy who runs that, we're probably going to butcher
these names, but.
Yep.
Yep, it's the screen-to-speech translation errors.
Jay Pope was very helpful for me.
He answered all my questions, he's got all this written up in a blog.
Yeah.
There's lots of good resources out there that people who have hashed it out have detailed
for us.
I'll give you one more, but I'm going to butcher this name, and I don't know the guy.
Like I've never talked with him, but John Baptiste Fevier or something, do you know that guy?
Oh yeah.
I don't know how to pronounce his name either, but I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah, sorry buddy, but we can link these in the show notes, and he seems to know his stuff.
Oh, that's a great idea.
Yeah, that was a good blog to hook onto.
There are, and they each have their little islands of expertise to, like Jay Pope, he's
the MySQL guru.
He has the scripts that will fix remote group subscriptions, and iron over a lot of the
bumps in status net.
Everybody has their little chunk documented.
Oh, here's a name that I will never get right.
His first name is Tobias, and his last name is Deerker Schaft.
I'm not sure.
I'm not even going to try with that, but you got it 100%.
Awesome.
He has an amazing Python script that with a little modification will import all of your
identica subscriptions without your interaction.
You could have told me this before I did it like for two days manually.
Exactly.
I started doing my 300 subscriptions by hand, and it was painful.
But once I got his script, you just hit yes on a couple of prompts, and it goes through
and does it all itself.
Oh, another link for the show notes then.
I think X1101 has a wiki where he's been gathering all of these resources for people
just starting out, and it would be, and you know, don't get me wrong.
There is status net documentation, and that's usually pretty high quality, but it's very
intimidating.
So having these little nuggets that you can reference is very handy when you're just
stuck in the field, and something is busted.
Your setup was a little different than mine.
I was on behind a router at home on just a little laptop, and I have to say my instance is
Pokey.
It's slow.
But you run off of VPS.
It seems to be...
How is that setting up?
I'm going to do it by SSH, everything.
I suppose I could have set up X Forwarding or something crazy like that, but since I'm
a web developer by day, I know a little bit about working on other web applications and
setting up other things on my VPS, so I was able to get the basic site up pretty easily,
and I think that's one of status net's best credits is when you do just unzip the whole
thing into a directory, you get a web page, and that's...
That's a pretty big step.
Yeah, all the PHP stuff is there, and a lot of the configs had defaults already plugged
into them that you just have to tweak a little bit.
Yeah, a page came up very easily, I was surprised.
Yeah, so that was definitely a plus when you just unzip the code into a directory, set
up a virtual site, visit the default page, there's something there, and it doesn't crash
and burn.
It's almost working from the get-go, but from there on, getting all the little intricate
bits going, and it's not so much that I was on a VPS, it's just the way status net is.
For something that just slings 140 character messages around, there is a lot of detail
in this system.
Yeah, it's doing quite a bit.
Yeah, like I said, I've installed loads of web applications on my VPS.
I have a mail server, web mail, loads of virtual sites, a lot of different stuff, and by far
status net is the most complicated thing I run.
Oh, great, so this is like the first thing I'm trying to get up and running, and so maybe
everything else will be a piece of cake.
That's true, it's like starting with Slackware, man, you've jumped that hurdle.
I jumped into the deep end, all right.
Yeah, so it's a very complex application if you want it to be, and the more complexity
you add, the cooler it gets.
For instance, when you start it up, it's kind of pokey, like you said.
It's slow, the messages don't come in automatically, you have to refresh all the time, but there's
little PHP server daemons that you can set up that will queue messages, get them out much
faster, like from two or three seconds to instantaneously.
Yeah, that's start daemons command.
Yeah, and that's, I don't...
I kind of like getting into that stuff and getting into the nitty gritty.
I didn't start at the install file, and I didn't read the configuration file all the
way through, so this could very well be documented, very well, and listed out you have to do
this first than that, than that.
This is typical geek behavior, though, because if you have the early instructions, you've
already lost.
Yeah, so just throwing it together, you kind of hit a brick wall, and that's where that
community thing picks up.
The federated users have a group on the service that you can send questions to.
You can always tell when Identica has gone down, because immediately half of the status
updates are questions about running an instance.
But once you get those daemons running on your server, everything gets much more responsive,
and then you're like, well, what else can I do?
You did a lot more of that than I did.
You were always playing around with plugins and stuff, I just...
One of the downsides to status is the exact same thing, that the more plugins you add,
the complexity increases pretty exponentially.
For instance, real-time updates.
Getting your status messages in as soon as they come in, I would think that would just
be a normal JavaScript call or something that wouldn't require a lot.
But to do it in status net, you have to install a whole separate HTTP server called Meteor
on your server, and then connect that to status net and put in some firewall rules.
It's just...
This application gets you to every single corner of your server.
It's really interesting.
Oh, I haven't got that far yet.
Yeah, and it's not installing a server like apt-get install Meteor.
It's not in the repo, so you have to download the Python code and run that from its own
Damon setup, which I wasn't familiar with in the init scripts, so that got me into that.
It's a great learning tool, I guess, but at the same time, just to have these little text
messages pop up instantaneously, it seems like a lot.
Yeah, it's like phone text, I mean, it's 140 characters, but yeah, there's a lot behind
the scenes.
It's a good learning experience, though.
I picked up quite a bit, getting an instance up and getting a domain.
Absolutely.
If you ever want to just dive straight into getting web apps like this running, status
net's a good choice.
If you want to dive straight into using status net, setting up your instance might not be
a great choice, but it's like you said, it's an excellent, excellent learning tool.
Or do like we did, you know, we started on identical, and then you set up the status net
on the side, and you got like a fallback to go ask questions with.
Yeah, absolutely.
I end up using both, actually, because mine's so pokey, and every time I walk back to
the laptop, it's got me logged out, and so I do tend, now that identical is a backup
and running, I do tend to use that, probably 80% of the time, but it is cool having your
own instance.
Yeah, it's fun to fool around with, but you're right.
Quite frankly, if I had known the parliamentium guys were up and running before I started an
instance, I probably would have gone with them.
Now I've got other people helping, or using the instance and helping me troubleshoot
things, so I'd feel like a jerk if I switched to somebody else.
So you didn't do like me and sit back and rub your chin and wait until something's established,
and everybody else works out the kinks, and then just, I jumped into yours and then ask
questions.
You guys, you guys paved the way for me.
Yeah, sometimes for crustaceans of Urchew, I'm virtuous.
So recently on the frag dev instance, we tried to set up the Twitter bridge, which seemed
like a good idea at the time.
It would allow us to bridge our Twitter accounts if we had them and send updates to Twitter,
I think.
I don't know, I don't actually have a Twitter account, so it was kind of mystical to me.
Yeah, I wondered why you set that up, because I didn't think you had Twitter, and we were
just going to send that over to the ether.
It was actually a P-squid-slash X-101, or wait.
X-1101.
Yeah, yeah.
They requested it, and I think that's cool, if they really want to see more out of the
service, fine, but I tried setting it up, and it actually killed all-dent propagation
or status propagation for like six hours.
This was a separate issue then the other day when identical dents stopped going out to
status net.
Yeah.
I think when that happens, it has something to do with the identical cash servers, not
communicating with us.
I think what happened here is those little PHP scripts that handle the messages back and
forth that I had to get running on the server, the Twitter bridge had its own set of those,
and I think they don't play well with the other ones.
Probably translating between two different APIs and stuff like that.
I have no idea, and that's the other thing, when this stuff breaks.
It's a black box of mystery.
Exactly.
I have no, well, I have recourse.
I condent to the feds group.
I can look in the documentation, but its status net is also at 1.0, so it's just getting
to that finalized point in its life, and there's still some rough edges, especially with
the new 1.0 release.
But Evan keeps plugging away on it.
That guy's, he doesn't stop.
Oh, yeah.
I tried it to Evan Padromo, is that how you pronounce his name?
That's how we do here on HPR, that's how it said.
He's done an excellent job creating this service, keeping identity cup and running.
It seems like he's got a lot on his back, and he does a fantastic job.
Yeah, I don't know how he manages, it must be like a small server farm that's running
all this stuff.
I don't know how you juggle all that.
Yeah, I know he has multiple database servers, and that's about all I know about the
infrastructure, but if running an instance with maybe three full time users is this difficult,
I can only imagine what he's running into.
Plus, I think he's the developer, too, so he programs the code as well.
I think he's doing most of the roles these days.
Yeah, so keeping a server like this up without the popularity is a bad way to say it, like
all the financial backing and attention that Twitter gets is pretty impressive.
I think I'm going to add one more thing.
Status net overall, it's a good piece of software, all things considered, with what it does,
it does a pretty good job at it, juggling all the server components, and I would like
to see a couple things I earned out, like some of the configuration issues where if you
configure something in the config file, it might conflict with a database entry, or famously,
nobody can subscribe to me on Identica because I started testing on a net address, and
that's been cemented into Identica somewhere.
So there's still a couple rough bits that could be sanded off, but I think it's got a pretty
good future.
Yeah, I would say if anybody enjoys Identica and wants to try kicking around making their
own instance, I mean, you'd only be helping the project move forward, plus hanging out
with fellow geeks.
Sure, and one of the things I should probably be doing is reporting bugs about this kind
of stuff.
If I run to an issue, I could hop over to the status.net issue tracker and add something.
So maybe that's what I'll do in the future to help things along, or if anybody has PHP
knowledge or can contribute in a coding kind of way, that would be awesome too.
Being that I'm just getting my feet wet with all this stuff, I always assume that most
of the problems I'm having is me.
So I have something configured wrong, or I started Damien's as root once and that did something
wrong.
Oh, yeah.
My Damien's still run is my personal user, and they should be running as www-data, and
I have them set up in the configuration file to run as www-data, but they run okay while
they're running as me.
So I'm not touching them.
They're staying that way.
It's kind of like MythTV.
Once you get it up and running, don't touch it.
Yeah.
You and a guy named PostBlue were pointing out a problem to me, and me not being knowledgeable
about it enough, 140 characters wasn't enough to get it across, and they seemed like cryptic
dents, and I'm just wondering, what are these guys trying to put direction, are they pointing
me in?
So I figured if you showed up at the log, I was going to pick your brain about it, but
maybe that's for next time.
Yeah.
And that's another kind of related issue that if you do try and troubleshoot status net
with status net, you either A, can't do it because status net isn't working, or B, you're
limited to 140 characters, so how much tech help can you fit into there?
Not that we're bashing on the service, it's just...
Yeah, this sounds awfully negative, but I love using the thing.
I get to keep in contact with a load of friends that I've made at conferences and don't
get to see that often.
It's good stuff.
I will continue.
I'll either be...
Well, we should say who we are over there.
Hey, that's a great idea.
You go right ahead.
NY Bill at gunmonkeynet.net slash status net.
Yeah, and I'm at micro.fragdev.com, not .net slash window go.
Oh, yeah.
That's another thing that kind of throws me off a bit, how NY Bill at gunmonkey.net and
then you are frag dev slash window go.
I think it has to do with you have multiple users on your instance, and I'm the only
user.
Oh no, you can actually do both formats.
Like I'm probably window go at micro.fragdev.com too.
Okay.
Because when you are...
Well, I'll just put this in there in case anybody's going to try it out.
Sometimes when you're trying to follow someone on a remote instance, you have to hit a little
remote button and then put in their URL, their name, get it just right.
The O status system that status net works off of is very fragile, and that's one of the
reasons identical has so many issues with my instance, because well, not even my instance,
just me.
Because I started testing with this alternate address, and now it's stuck in there forever.
I'm never going to get it out.
You've broken the internet.
Really?
Yeah, that's, you know, no kidding.
It's just, and it's very random too, because some people can subscribe to me and some
people can't.
I haven't the foggiest.
And that's one of the problems with submitting bugs is I'm kind of a dummy in certain cases,
and you can't write that into a bug.
So I hope it didn't sound like we're being negative on status net.
We're just saying we're having fun with it and learning about it, and if anybody else
wants to try it, come on in.
Look us up.
Yeah, absolutely.
Status net.
It's an adventure.
That's perfect.
Yeah, contact details.
I finally have an email address, and it's very similar.
It's NY Bill at gunmonkeynet.net, so if anybody can finally email me from HPRland, feel
free.
Nice.
And what am I?
I think I'm podcast at fragdev.com.
I'll double check that, but I'm pretty sure that'll get through.
And we'll put all this stuff in the show notes.
Sounds like a plan.
Okay.
Cool.
We wrapped another one up.
Nice.
Have a nice day.
And the outro music.
It sounded ridiculous.
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