commit f1dabd4ba43899cf276603eca84c996c1fcf9766
parent 43bc135acdc267a466b5428dbd399be8adccd093
Author: Jake Bauer <jbauer@paritybit.ca>
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:29:30 -0400
Finish draft of blog post
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 74 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/pages/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma-2-customizing-my-instance.md b/pages/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma-2-customizing-my-instance.md
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
## Mastodon to Pleroma — 2 — Customizing My Instance
-[//]: # "META_TEXT"
+[//]: # "Now that I have a Pleroma instance up and running with an account, it's time to make that instance my own through backend and frontend customizations."
[//]: # "main.min.css"
@@ -15,6 +15,79 @@
Now that I have a Pleroma instance up and running with an account, it's time to
make that instance my own through backend and frontend customizations.
+Pleroma provides so many customization options, it took me a while to go through
+all of them and customize my instance to my liking. That is by no means a bad
+thing; it was a really enjoyable process and it feels like it's social media but
+for hackers (not the Hollywood kind).
+
+There weren't many backend customizations I wanted to do. For one, the default
+character limit of 5000 is more than enough for me, and far less
+restrictive-feeling than Mastodon's unchangeable 500. I turned off the chat room
+(which I think is a really cool feature) and closed registrations because I
+didn't need those features on a single-person instance. I was pretty satisfied
+with pretty much everything and found it really cool to see an option for
+[exposing my instance over
+Tor](https://docs.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/onion_federation/) as a
+hidden service as well as an option to expose my instance over the Gopher
+protocol.
+
+As far as customizing the frontend, well, this is where it got fun and
+interesting. I could change pretty much anything I wanted about the instance's
+frontend down to the UI itself (though I stuck with the default Pleroma frontend
+because I actually quite like it). I changed the favicon of the site (something
+I couldn't do with Mastodon), the background for the entire instance, the logo
+for the site as it appears at the top-center of the page, and even the default
+theme for the UI.
+
+I created a new logo for my Pleroma instance just like I did with my Mastodon
+instance:
+
+<figure>
+ <a href="/img/logo-pleroma-128.png"><img src="/img/logo-pleroma-512.png"
+ alt="My Pleroma instance's logo: A black circle around a dark red circle all
+ encircling a yellow circle which has a black coloured Pleroma logo in the
+ centre."/></a>
+</figure>
+
+I also set the background of both my profile and my Pleroma instance to a 1
+pixel by 1 pixel solid colour image. I liked the background colour that I used
+for my profile banner on Mastodon, and wanted to keep it for this new instance.
+The colour is: <span
+style="colour:#fff;background-color:#282c37">#282c37</span>, in case you're
+curious.
+
+Finally, for the theme, I landed on the Vulpes One theme created by
+@Feuerfuchs@fedi.vulpes.one which I found via
+[plthemes.vulpes.one](https://plthemes.vulpes.one/), and added it to my instance
+by once again following the [Pleroma documentation on adding
+themes](https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/configuration/howto_theming_your_instance/).
+
+As far as emoji packs, just like with Mastodon one can also add custom emoji to
+Pleroma instances. I'm not a big user of emoji though, so I didn't really bother
+for my instance.
+
+Except for profile-specific settings, all of the above customizations were
+accomplished by putting files into the "static directory", a place the Pleroma
+server looks to serve custom resources. I set mine at `/var/lib/pleroma/static`
+because that's what the installation instructions used and I didn't have a
+reason to change it.
+
+Some other minor changes I made were: setting the default page to show
+non-logged-in users (i.e. anyone who isn't me but is visiting
+pleroma.paritybit.ca in their browser) my profile page, turned off showing the
+instance-specific panel, and updating the About page for the instance.
+
+The more I use Pleroma, the more I like it. It allows me to customize so much
+that I can truly make an instance feel like my own rather than yet another
+Mastodon instance. The plethora of tunables and customizables from things like
+the number of options once can add to a poll to even being able to turn off
+federation all-together, really make it feel like the hacker's version of
+Mastodon.
+
+_Disclaimer: I am in no way trying to disparage the effort's of the Mastodon
+folk, I just really like Pleroma and I am realizing it's the better choice for
+me._
+
_This is my seventy-seventh post for the
[#100DaysToOffload](https://social.paritybit.ca/tags/100DaysToOffload)
challenge. You can learn more about this challenge over at
