Science Mike @[email protected]

We've got quite a growing number of people here--almost 500 now. Make sure you look at the Local Timeline to see who is here, follow some folks, and give an #introductions.

For those who want a hybrid public/private conversation, following all the active users here and then setting toots to followers only seems close-ish.

I had a great time asking Jenny McHargue (aka my wife) your questions on #AskScienceMike this week. Don't mis this one. https://asksciencemike.podbean.com/e/episode-171-meet-the-honey-badger/

Ok, for those still having trouble: would you mind trying one more time? If you've been trying on a movie device, I'd be curious to see if you get the same result on a computer.

I'm working on a Discourse server for our community, but I need help testing Patreon integration. If you're reading this, and are a Patron, try this:

1. Go to https://discourse.theliturgists.com
2. Click "Sign Up."
3. Click the "with Patreon" button.
4. Sign into Patreon.
5. Tell me if it works or not. If it doesn't work, screen shot the error and post that in your reply.

Thanks! This could be cool if I get it to work.

So, now I'm looking into other options. SocialEngine is compelling, but it's not open source. Discourse is an option as well, but it seems a little to forum-oriented for what I envision.

Does anyone have a platform they'd like us to consider?

But, there's still a big need that isn't met my that mix. Most of the social media activity for our community happens in private Facebook groups--and there is no official group because of my concerns with Facebook as a company.

I'm looking for a platform to live at community.theliturgists.com to act as a more discussion oriented site with the capacity for people to create their own private communities within. I thought friendica could be that platform, but no.

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social.theliturgists.com - our vision for an open source replacement for Twitter. Good for short messages with broad reach. Less prone to harassment than Twitter. My main presence on social media. Hopefully the other hosts start to love it too. (Thanks @vishnu for trying it out!)

Slack - a private, touch to sign up for community for in-depth discussion.

Patreon - The best way for us to interact with the people who make the podcast possible.

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We've been rightly accused of having a scattershot social media strategy as The Liturgists. For the Science Mike platform, I'm all in here and on Slack, but for The Liturgists, something more nuanced is needed.

So, here's what we have and what we need.

The Liturgists on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We're not deleting these, and we'll post marketing related to our podcasts episodes, events, etc.

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Oh yeah, I'm @mike over there. Since it's a fediverse project, people on social.theliturgists.com and community.theliturgists.com can follow each other.

Just know, I'm not convinced this will be a viable thing. The groups feature is pretty primitive, and discoverability of friendica is bad in general.

You can create an account at https://community.theliturgists.com. There's not much there now, but if you'd like to help me test it (especially if you'd like to test groups), I'll see you over there.

I'm really happy with Mastodon. Now that this instance is populated, I feel like all the good parts of Twitter are here, without the toxicity. But, Mastodon isn't a good place for longer posts or involved discussions, and it doesn't offer groups.

Another Fediverse project does. It's called Friendica, and it's meant to be an alternative to Facebook--including private groups.

I've got a friendica server running now...

It's a test message for something I'm working on.

@steven @joeld @rainer @mdm @hagridaaron @kirk @giddie @cedric Also, I really want to go with friendica instead of diaspora because it federates with Mastodon well. People could follow each other across the two communities, which I think if way cool.

@steven @joeld @rainer @mdm @hagridaaron @kirk @giddie @cedric So, I tried using DV as a dedicated web server and GRID as the database backed--they're in the same datacenter, so I thought performance would be fine.

NOPE. Unusably slow.

So, this is a project that will actually take time, and a lot more time than I have since MariaDB wasn't a thing when I was a sysadmin. It literally didn't exist.

Do any of you have database admin experience? I am way out of my league here.

@steven @joeld @rainer @mdm @hagridaaron @kirk @giddie @cedric I've got a DV (MediaTemple's language for a VPS) and a GRID account (MediaTemple's language for shared hosting on a cluster).

The DV is running Maria, the GRID MySQL. Friendica want's more web configuration that GRID allows, but works fine on DV. But, when I try to get a database going on MariaDB, it's errors everywhere, while the install is smooth and effortless on the MySQL on GRID.

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@steven @joeld @rainer @mdm @hagridaaron @kirk @giddie @cedric UPDATE: I tried to get a freindica instance rolling on MediaTemple, and it went... poorly. I know Apache pretty well, but Nginx was just coming into vogue when I left IT to become Science Mike, and now Nginx is everywhere (and recommended for friendica). It took me some time to get the web portion going--the docs online didn't match my experience, but that's good to go now.

The problem is the database. The database is borked...