(fallen london stamps by The thing about self-hosting is that I want the freedom to SFTP into my site’s guts and fuck things up for myself, but I don’t want the stress of “something somewhere went rogue and now your site is eating 2000 GB RAM on a day when you have no spoons to deal with it”
Basically things fucking up is fine as long as it happens on my schedule
the context is that I have an Akkoma instance on managed hosting, Akkoma being yet another newfangled federated social media like Mastodon or GoToSocial. (I still like GTS, but a) it's still in alpha and b) I wanted something that was newbie-user-friendlier and feature-rich)
and on one hand it's really nice having someone else handle backups and upgrades. on the other hand, I'm chafing at the inability to add custom themes, emoji packs, or an alternate frontend hosted on a subdomain* without asking my hosting provider. as someone who grew up basically forbidden to ask for help, it just feels Actually Mortifying
*Akkoma has a variety of different frontends available. my personal preference is Akkoma-FE, the "default" which is kind of dense but can do practically everything. but there's another frontend, Mangane, which resembles Twitter and is thus undeniably easier to use if you're new to this whole thing. that's a pretty big deal since I'd like to open up my instance to friends! unfortunately, it has a bunch of little annoyances like lacking a proper /about page for your instance and hiding part of your profile behind another tab.
I was thinking that it might be neat to have Mangane on, say, mangane.[myinstance.com], so that it's available if you wanted to use it, while not being the primary view for the site. it has been done, but it requires being able to get your hands into the guts of your own server. and I get the feeling that's probably beyond the scope of what managed hosting is comfortable with, whether enabling it or doing it themselves
