It's only some months later that I noticed something was going wrong: it wasn't getting updated. Applications hosted on YunoHost depend on volunteers to keep them up to date and Misskey had recently released a major update with large technical changes. The people in charge of its packaging tried a few different things but couldn't make it work within the YunoHost environment. And so it was left to drift out of date.

If it even needs mentioning, hosting a social media platform with no software updates is a Bad Thing™. The users aren't getting the latest new features and bug fixes, while the competition keeps moving forward. More importantly, though, it also means no security fixes. For an interconnected online platform, that's a Very Bad Thing™. I wanted to keep it going, but I also didn't want to take charge of the update process myself. I have enough on my plate already.

And so it was left to hang for entirely too long. Eventually, I decided to see what it would take for me to make a clean install, without relying on YunoHost at all. I created a virtual environment and followed the official tutorial to build a test installation. Surprisingly enough, that came together pretty well, and I soon had a fresh setup running the latest version. All I needed was a place to host it. A Black Friday sale later, I had a second VPS that cost me less than half the price of the original. I had my way out.

Over the holidays, I configured the new VPS with the needed dependencies. I then shutdown the live Misskey install and backed up everything I could. It turns out the brain of the system all lives in a single Postgres database, which is simple enough to back up and restore somewhere else. So, after following the Misskey installation tutorial but before launching it for the first time, I restored the database copy. When the time came for the first launch, the magic happened on its own: Misskey detected the existing database, updated what was required for the changes of the past two years, then came alive on its own. And that was pretty much it: I now had a fully refreshed instance going, on its own server, running on the latest version available!

From here, future updates will be simple enough to handle. I won't have the convenience of YunoHost to back me up, but Misskey's updates are designed to be simple to apply, so a few command line inputs and I'll be set. That's one less thorn in my side!

Meanwhile, my existing YunoHost installation is still running smoothly for several other tasks and I love the convenience it brings. It just wasn't meant to be for this specific use case.

#Fediverse #Misskey #Migration #VPS #Projects

– Doctacosa