What a wild ride it has been! I am writing this just as a sort of "woo!" for the end of the year.

I did a lot this year, mostly related to health stuff. my wheelchair was meant to be delivered earlier this month but alas did not, but that means it will be a brand new thing!

I became the web warlock of Neokosmos (this was meant to be a link but the live site seems to be down and my site is still beta), a project that captured my heart since 2017 and has now captured my soul as i struggle with google's api to allow the writers to have 0 friction in updating the site, as the books are still WIP.

I got a cat!

I did a drawing a day almost for an entire year, starting with my very first post on 07/02/2022, which means only a month left until that's been going on a full year!

I did a lot with many projects over this year that made me very happy.

I even migrated servers, not planning on doing that again!

I made new friends, reconnected with old, and had so much fun.

I hope this coming year will be just as amazing!

So. our story begins last month when i moved servers.
i didn't set up a backup script because i felt that it was unnecessary as i had server backups enabled. Easy!

Until last week that is, when during a change to how i store what date a post was created on, i accidentally made everything on the same day.
why does sed change the creation date metadata anyway‽‽

I quickly found out that server backups are just images, snapshots, of the server, meaning I'd have to loose the last 24 hours of data from stuff like myfriendsare.gay which was a no go for me.

So. that absolutely sucked, luckily i had a partial backup in the form of the original images for my art. so i managed to automate the restoral of that for the most part, excluding about the previous two weeks.

After that, i decided to set up the amazing Backup Script!

I think it was a clever script;

#! /bin/bash

# Make Backups
tar -cvzf "./beefox.xyz/beefox-xyz-$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S").tar.gz" -C /root/beefox.xyz/ ./static/files/ ./SitePosts/ ./webMentio
ns && echo -e "\e[1m\e[38;2;238;170;102mFinished Site Backup\e[0m" &
T1=${!}
sudo -u postgres pg_dumpall -v | gzip -9 > "./postgres/postgres-$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S").gz" && echo -e "\e[1m\e[38;2;238;170;102
mFinished Postgres Backup\e[0m" &
T2=${!}
mongodump --gzip --archive="./mongodb/mongo-$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S").gz" && echo -e "\e[1m\e[38;2;238;170;102mFinished Mongo Back
up\e[0m" &
T3=${!}

wait ${T1}
wait ${T2}
wait ${T3}
echo -e "\e[1m\e[38;2;238;170;102mFinished

So, twitter is dying and you've decided you don't want to deal with corporations any more. But what is the fediverse (or the list of the things in the title)?
The fediverse put simply is like email, except it is styled differently. Everyone has their own address, for example mine is @foxes@myfriendsare.gay, and anyone can talk to anyone else no matter where they are. I can talk to @foo@mastodon.example just as easily as i can talk to @bar@pixelfed.example.

What do you mean?? How's it work??

To put it simply, your instance, the site that your account is on, keeps a list of other sites it knows about. When you create a post, the site sends the post to all the sites it knows about. And then other people can boost that post which tells all of their followers about your post, even if they don't know about the site you are on yet! This is called federation.

What about likes?

Likes, favourites, kudos, whatever you may call them, they work the exact same way. and i mean exactly the same way! Your instance sends the same message, except for the fact the message is labelled "Like" instead of "Post". This however does mean that there is no such thing as accurate numbers in the fediverse, because it takes time for information to pass across the internet. If you follow someone however it is usually only 30 seconds or so at the most.
And this also applies for follows, for DMs (which are just posts, see Hold on, Admins can read my DMs??), for emoji reacts, for anything that can happen on the