I have now finalised a move of my self-hosted Fediverse services, Friendica and Pleroma in my case, from one cloud provider to another. Yesterday I closed down my last server on the old provider.

All in all I have to say that I am impressed on how smoothly it went after all. With Friendica I did a change going from MySQL (on old provider) to MariaDB (on new provider) as that is the more feature-rich alternative. It is now running on an ARM (!) server with 2 vCPUs and 8gb ram, compared to 2 vCPUs (Intel) with 2gb ram.

The new Friendica server does have one problem. It might be related to the CPU architecture (ARM), which I've honestly never used before, but after a couple of hours it all grinds to a halt. Looking at the server processes there is nothing visible/notable: less than 1% cpu utilisation, less than 10% ram used, plenty of disk space left etc, and yet it will after a while grind to a halt that in the end generates 404's.

I have tweaked threads, workers, memory allocation etc, and done "all the tricks" with nginx/php-fpm/mariadb (all of which are things I am used to tweaking), with no luck on those things. The one and ONLY thing that seems to solve it is to restart the php7.4-fpm process, which luckily is a quick thing to do via cronjob. Still though, it feels like giving "pain killers instead of surgery". Solving the wrong problem. But hey, it works, and is even really fast now, if I do that restart, so I do.

The Pleroma server migration also went really well. The documentation provided good instructions (an area that could be improved on Friendica btw) for how/what to do and when, which was a good thing as Erlang/PostgreSQL is somewhat out of my improvisation comfort zone. It took some time, with lots of compilation and db import being done, but all the instructions worked perfectly.

One and only small niggle with the Pleroma instance is that the /.well-known/hosts-meta URL comes down as a file download instead of being presented as an XML, which is what ActivityPub apparently is expecting. I've tried to work around that in nginx, with no luck, and so I am starting to suspect I would need to change something, or re-compile something, in Pleroma. However, having tested that URL on instances run by others they all seem to have the same, so perhaps isn't a huge issue...?

Friendica and Pleroma are quite different in how they work, and also how they feel, which is part of the reason to why I use both, when most others would be fine with one or the other. I use Pleroma mostly as a Twitter replacement, for faster content streams. I use Friendica more as a mix between Facebook/forum, with its threaded views, which makes the information flow a little bit slower, which can be nice when there are no algorithms placing things in front of me. I am less likely to miss things on Friendica, but I could easily miss great posts (threads even) on Pleroma if I don't sit in front of my screen when they are posted.

In general I consider Friendica to be the most feature-rich Fediverse service I've tried (MissKey felt promising, but on the servers I've tried there is always something missing or not working). Pleroma on the other hand feels like a tank. A fast tank even. It just works/rolls. I have no idea how to fix things in Pleroma if they were to break though, the only part in the setup that I feel comfortable with is the actual server management and also nginx. I know as much Erlang as my mother, which is to say "nothing". The ultimate Fediverse wish-for-service for me would probably be a feature mix between Friendica/Pleroma/MissKey, built as Pleroma. :)