If you follow me on Mastodon you know it as my home server. If you click through to my ForgeJo you know it as my git forge. It’s the host that hosts my private Elk server where the majority of my toots come from. It’s a lot of things but I’ve never really spoken about it or really come to terms with what it is now and in the future.
In the beginning#
When I bought the domain I was intending on using it for projects that I wanted to host outside of my homelab. I use another domain for all my internal services so wanted something that was a bit unique. A remotelab is what I imagine a remote homelab is called and have a guess where I’m based!
The first project#
I got interested in the fediverse and decided to start exploring as I’d quit Reddit. I used the domain to host my own Lemmy server, the idea was that at this point the remotelab.uk domain wasn’t tied to my identity so it was clean. Lemmy didn’t work out so I ditched it.
Mastodon#
During the experiment with Lemmy I was on Mastodon on mastodon.social (I think). It was ok but I wanted my own piece of the fediverse, somewhere that was mine. I looked into hosting my own server but at the time I thought it wasn’t worth it so went with masto.host (who’re awesome!). Originally I was going to put it on a subdomain but for better or worse stuck with the root domain. So my Mastodon server is the public entry to remotelab.uk
Github Exodus#
I’d been toying with the idea of moving away from Github for a while so setup a temporary ForgeJo instance on code.remotelab.uk (ha to it ever being temporary). I’ve since moved everything from Github to this server and even selfhost my own runners.
Other stuff#
There’s a bunch of other stuff living on the infrastructure that doesn’t live under the remotelab.uk name but it’s still important to how it’s growing and what it’s turning into.
The future#
I don’t think of remotelab.uk as a second home, over the years it’s turned into one of my primary online presences, with that in mind it’s not going anywhere in fact I have more plans for it.
I intend to move Mastodon from masto.host to my own server at some point, it’s a pretty daunting task (which given my day job is kinda crazy). I’m also tempted to move it to a subdomain and accept losing all my post history. This way it frees up the root domain for something else.
mikebell.io needs to die in a fire. I’ve had that domain for a long time now and honestly it’s troublesome now. I’m tied in to Google through it and even after my attempts to degoogle I’m still giving them money for it. .io domains have a troubled past so it’d be nice to move away from that. It’s also an expensive domain, it costs more than my multitude of other Mike Bell related domains. Giving it up will be hard though.
I like the idea of remotelab.uk becoming more of a community somehow, not just a place for me. I really like what omg.lol is doing (if only I had the money for my own TLD!) which has got me thinking…