Glitchy.Social. The beginning
I've decided that the computing power of my Hetzner dedicated server allows me to provide some services to others. This is where Glitchy.Social has started.
I already had the Synapse Matrix server hosted in my personal domain. And I thought that it was stable enough for me to allow other users to register. With registration tokens, I'll provide, of course. But my personal domain represents a part of my second name. "Who wants a Matrix account in the domain that represents a part of someone's second name?" - I thought.
That's how my Matrix server has migrated to a newly purchased glitchy.social domain. Actually, that was not a migration, but rather starting from scratch. I dropped the database of Synapse and Matrix Authentication Service, changed the homeserver name in all configs, and started fresh.
You can chat with me now at @yehor:glitchy.social.
Then I started to think about how people will know how to join. Or even will know about Glitchy.Social itself? "I need a landing page. Or a website!" - I concluded.
yevi.org is a Dcusaurus-powered website. And I really like its flexibility. It is as simple as adding or editing markdown files, but at the same time, you can write your own JavaScript components using ReactJS. Isn't it cool?
So I present you today a shiny result of a one-night work: www.glithcy.social!
"Hey! That's a nice logo you have there," you'll suddenly exclaim, at least in my head. And I appreciate that reaction, because it is not an AI-generated slop. It is several hours of Inkscape with two project managers beside me: my wife and my daughter. I think they are still unsatisfied with my work, but we will improve it someday. For now, it is done, and it is nice in my opinion.
The font is Cal Sans by Mark Davis, and the glitch effect is inspired by a guide from Nick Saporito.
There is some info on the Matrix server on the website, primarily on how to request a registration token. Also, the Terms of Service, which I wrote by myself, felt disgusted, then asked AI for help, felt disgusted again, combined those two disgusting pieces of human and machine minds, and now you are forced to read it before joining. Sorry about that.
This is how it started, and I'm going to deploy a Mastodon instance in that nice domain as well. Maybe other services later, who knows.