Project: Scrim Social

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 01:16:15 GMT

Another project I've been getting excited about is setting up a Pixelfed server for roller derby people. P, and other roller derby friends, tell me that there's a desire to get away from Instagram and other Meta technologies, after they decided to openly discriminate against LGBT+ people and women. Pixelfed is self-hostable image hosting software which is part of the Fediverse meaning it interacts with Mastodon, Friendica and so on.

So P registered a domain, scrim.social, and pointed it at my colo server. If you click the link about the time I post it, it'll 404 as I'm having a bit of trouble getting the software up and running. It's not very mature software which isn't great, but it's there and I'm trying not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Next Saturday there's a pair of fixtures in Salford with two Manchester teams, Durham and Hull. Ideally I'd like to have it up and running by then, with backup + restore tested, so I can print off some flyers and start getting people interested. P has a proper artist friend involved, but I also scribbled a few logo ideas at the last Queer Club.

Over time I'll need to look at how performant the hardware is, and consider alternatives if it gives me too much trouble. And there'll be the day to day hassle of moderation which comes with every Fediverse server (I've got a copy of my Mastodon instance's blocklist to give me a head start on blocking most of the Nazis out there). But still, giving a bunch of queer people an escape from Meta seems like a good use of my tech skills!

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You Don't Live Like I Do

Project: Scrim Social