New Services: BookWyrm, Etherpad, and a Few Things to Know

#announcement #infrastructure #services

A few days ago I published the first post here and launched folk.zone with a modest set of services. Since then I've added two more that have been on the list, consolidated everything onto a single machine, and wanted to share a few things.

What's New

books.folk.zone: BookWyrm is now online. It's a federated reading tracker, part Goodreads, part social network for books. You can log what you're reading, write reviews, follow readers on other BookWyrm instances, and have those reviews federate out to Mastodon. It's invite-only for now as I set it up.

pad.folk.zone: Etherpad is open. Real-time collaborative documents with no account required. Create a pad, share the URL, write together. Great for drafting things with people who don't want to sign up for anything. Pads persist but I make no archival guarantees.

folk.zone: Finally, the homepage now has a TownSquare widget tucked below the footer. It's a small presence layer that shows visitors on the page in real time. You can move around, wave, and say a few words to whoever else happens to be there. No account needed. A small nod toward making the web feel inhabited again.

About Invites

A few people have reached out asking how to get access to folk.zone. I really appreciate the interest. One thing to know is these services are not interconnected the way omg.lol is. An invite to folk.zone is not an invite to everything. Each service has its own account system and its own waitlist.

When you reach out, please tell me which service you want access to, and ideally why. The services that currently require an invite or application are:

Fully open services (no invite needed) include git, gist, irc, paste, pad, wiki, links, bridge, go, write, and rss. Just visit them and use them!

Find me at @brennan@social.lol with your request.

The Stack

I originally described folk.zone as running across four separate machines. That was the plan, but in practice everything is now running on a single machine, nitro, a Core i5-12400F with 15 GB RAM. The other machines are still around but not currently serving folk.zone traffic.

This simplifies deployment and makes it easier to keep things reliable. It also means that if nitro goes down, everything goes down at once. I'm at peace with that trade-off for now.

What's Still Coming

pics.folk.zone (Pixelfed) is still on the list, among a few more.

If you have requests, the wiki is a good place to document ideas, or find me on IRC at irc.folk.zone.