Hoisting Pixelfed on a Fluffy Cloud

Reclaim Cloud
#1

I’ve seen Mark Corbett Wilson mentioning he installed pixelfed on Reclaim Cloud, what does it take, how might I give it a spin?

#2

Oh no! I mispoke. Sorry Alan.
I’ve set up all the other platforms I mentioned, but not PixelFed. I’ll edit my post.
I joined a PixelFed instance and intend to install my own on Reclaim Cloud, but haven’t figured it out yet. I’ll be looking to Taylor at Reclaim to help me. Again, I apologize for creating this confusion.
Mark

#3

I haven’t had time to play with Pixelfed, but it’s been on my list of things to check out for a long time.

I spent a few minutes checking out the documentation and github repo.

It looks like Pixelfed is a LAMP stack thing, but It’s not exactly compatible with Shared Hosting, as it has dependency requirements for caching as well as image and video processing (makes sense given what it is) that will make it not really an option to run there, although I’d be curious to try and see what works and what doesn’t.

Their instructions assume a from scratch set up on a LAMP stack compatible server, and its a bit complicated, and certainly not automated. The github repo however does have a docker-compose.yml file that might speed things up. For folks that want to try it on Reclaim Cloud before I get to it I’d do this.

  1. Install a Docker Engine CE environment from the Marketplace
  2. From the terminal download the git repo, copy the .env.docker file to .env
    git clone https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/
cd pixelfed
cp .env.docker .env
  3. Edit the .env file to play with the options. You can do this with your preferred cli text editor, or the Reclaim Cloud “Config” button (wrench icon).
  4. Back at the terminal, spin up the application
    cd /root/pixelfed
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d

You can use this command to check the logs to see if things are working or not

docker-compose logs -f

If you need to make changes to settings in the .env file, you’ll usally have to restart the docker stack. You can do so like this:

cd /root/pixelfed
docker-compose down
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d
#4

Another thing I’ll note, is that Pixelfed, like Mastodon is designed for small to large sized instances that host several accounts, so you may want to sign up with an existing instance instead of hosting your own if you don’t want to play with hosting this stuff just yet.

#5

Thanks for looking into this. It was just an idle thought to consider a self hosted, but I am nor all that keen (yet), but want to find something worth doing in da cloud.

I dont need it to be my main archive, mine are managed first on my machine, then zapped to flickr and elsewhere. Am looking some mechanisms to cross post, maybe EchoFeed.

I’m okay with pixelfed.social but it looks like my Canadian co-op where I do Mastodon is setting one up. Looks like Meta just gave PIxelfed a big boost!

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