Hello world!
Welcome to subcon.town! Subcon town is a small private "pubnix" server, hosted for friends and family. Subcon offers ssh access, webpage hosting and various other cloud services, such as nextcloud and git hosting.
News
Januari 2023: Plans for the year
Happy new year! Subcon has come a long way since the change of the year. First off: we have moved to new hardware! The server is now powered by an Odroid H3 board. With that, a number of other changes have been made as well.
Storage on the server has been totally reworked; the old storage media have been replaced with a 2TB NVMe drive that will, for one, house the user home directories, and a 4TB SATA SSD that will house all variable data; user repositories, websites, databases, the lot. All of this has been set up with convenient LVM partitions that can be easily resized if more space is required in the future.
Many services have been updated. The gitea server has been replaced with a new gogs server, now hosted at factory.subcon.town. The old snikket server has also been replaced with a new prosody setup, offering most of the same xmpp services at jab.subcon.town. Note that old snikket accounts are thus gone. The fedora installation has also been updated to fedora 37.
The most notable change however will be the decrease in processing power. While we still have about 75% of the processing power, the upside is that the system as a whole is seriously more power efficient. We are now running at a fraction of the power the old server needed, going from 60Wh on average to a mere 6Wh. Serious power savings like that will lower upkeep cost, which I can in turn invest in improving other things, such as my god awful internet bandwidth.
Remember that even with all these changes done, the server is, and will likely forever, be a work in progress. There are still some rough edges needing work, further configuring of services, and for the current while, a lot of work writing wiki pages at library.subcon.town.
November 2022: Introducing Funkwhale
After some fiddling around on the server, I have managed to finally get a Funkwhale instance set up! Funkwhale is a piece of software that will let us host our music libraries. You can listen to your and others' music from the web interface, or use any compatible app on your phone or tablet. Besides that, Funkwhale federates, much like our Akkoma instance. You will be able to listen to the libraries of people on other instances as well!
On a technical note, getting Funkwhale to work took a little bit of doing; it has been manually set up according to the installation instructions for Arch Linux, adapted here and there to suit Fedora. One remaining irk because of this, is that Funkwhale was not made with SELinux in mind. One remaining problem that you might run into is that freshly uploaded music may not play initially; this is caused by incorrect SELinux permissions. I have currently added a cronjob that will check these permissions and fix them every few minutes. If your music does not play, please wait a few minutes and try again.
For the time being, users will be limited to 5GB libraries. If needed, you may request to have this limit changed. Please do check before uploading if your music has already been uploaded by others; preventing duplicate uploads will help conserve space on the server.
Happy listening!
November 2022: Phasing out Gitea and introducing Fossil SCM
Recently it has come to my attention that the owners of Gitea have been making some changes in their project management, mainly in the form of providing support to businesses. For more information, view the Gitea blog.
Unfortunately, with the way things have gone, the community seems to be weary and distrustful of a number of moves made by the current owners. My personal concerns are about one of the owners using Gitea is a lucrative money-making scheme. To me, that's a deal breaker, as I don't know if I can still trust the project after this. Unfortunate, since I know Gitea is supposed to be a community-run effort.
As such, I have decided to deprecate the Gitea service on Subcon Town. It will no longer be updated, but will be kept alive for a while until all projects have been migrated. I am additionally looking into migrating the data to a Gogs installation, continuing a git hosting service that way. Meanwhile, I have opted to set up Fossil as an alternative. Fossil SCM is a slightly different VCS, similar to git, but more geared towards tightly nit development groups that work closer together.
While fossil may feel a bit more old-fashioned, I think it's also a bit more of a fit with Subcon's pubnix feel. Users will be able to set up and manage their fossil repositories from their home directories, in the new "public_fossil" directory. To create new repositories, you can use the "mkfossil <filename>" command. This is a wrapper around "fossil init" that helps set the correct file permissions. If done right, your new repo will pop up at museum.subcon.town from where you'll be able to administrate it.
With the introduction of new commands and functions for users, I plan on writing a wiki article that lists all available functions and how to use them. This should help new users settle in. Note that the README files in your home directories will be kept updated as well.
Hope to see you soon on Subcon Town!
October 2022: Finalizing stuff
It has been quite a while, but slowly the server has been getting ready to start functioning as an actual pubnix community. The website has received a little touch-up, the copyright notice has been updated, and a lot of work has been done under the hood.
The initial plan once everything is ready, is to allow a few people on the server for testing: this is to iron out some issues before letting any more people in. Depending on how much trouble we run into, this may take a little while. After that, I hope I can welcome more friends onto my server, in hopes of making this another way of getting together and staying in touch.
The available services on subcon town are still being tweaked; however we do now have proper http, gopher and gemini hosting for our users. Nextcloud and gitea will remain available as well, as will the new Akko's Friture akkoma instance. However, after some consideration, I have decided to also shutdown a few services: Bookstack, the wiki solution, will be removed as it is simply not in active use. The Snikket xmpp service might be discontinued if I cannot find a fix for the http issues it has; it might be replaced with a regular Prosody installation.
I hope to bring more news on a much sooner schedule. Please wait warmly!
Services
| Akkoma: | akkos.fritu.re |
| Doku wiki: | library.subcon.town |
| Funkwhale: | odeon.subcon.town |
| Gemini: | gemini://subcon.town |
| Gopher: | gopher://subcon.town |
| Gogs: | factory.subcon.town |
| Fossil SCM: | museum.subcon.town |
| Nextcloud: | cloud.subcon.town |
Additionally, subcon.town also serves the webpages for comfitu.re and its subdomains.
Users
| fristi |
FAQ
Q: It's been a year, are you ever gonna get this show running?
A: Yes. I really want this to work. A lot of things are in place now and
quite frankly, it's time to invite people in here to see how things go.
Q: Is Subcon Town open for new users?
A: No. The intended purpose is an invite-only tilde community, for friends and
family. After the testing phase, I will start sending out invites to people interested.
You may ask for an invite as well at that point, but the plan is to only let comfy people in.
Q: Can I get an account on one of your services?
A: Only as an existing member. We are currently not open for
new users to join. If you're already a member, ask
@fristi for an account.
Q: Didn't you also run kartoffel.cafe?
A: Yes, but a recent change of plans made running an activitypub
instance not very feasible, so I made the difficult choice of closing
the instance, for good. I currently run a new instance called
Akko's Friture, but it's a single user instance for now.
Q: Is that the Yoshi's Island font?
A: Yes. It was good game.
Copyright notice
The "Subcon Town" branding, including logos and icons used on this website, are licensed as CC BY-NC-ND. You may share and redistribute these works, but please do not edit them or use them for commercial purposes. For more details, read the license.
The source code of this website is licensed under the Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0. You may use this source code as you wish. For more details, read the license. The source code of this website may be viewed here.
Third party works
The fonts and background image used on this website are not owned by Subcon Town. Subcon Town does not claim any rights to these original works unless otherwise specified by their respective licensing.
Complaints
If you feel any material is incorrectly used on this website, or otherwise infringes on your rights, feel free to file a complaint with fristi「AT」subcon.town. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.