# About Keyboard Vagabond

Keyboard Vagabond is a place where nomads, travelers, backpackers, whoever, can come together in a digital space that is free of advertising and the attention economy to share information and experiences. It is a place of mutual respect, courtesy, and understanding not just for the members who join, but also for those people and places we encounter on our journeys.

#### Why Keyboard Vagabond

Keyboard Vagabond was made because I saw multiple instances of people saying that, while there are travel communities on different instances, there was not a space specifically for nomads, so I thought I would make it.

## What to expect and commitments

Moderation style - An online community of respect and courtesy that is simultaneously light on moderation and banning, yet firm on not tolerating bigotry, hatred, etc. Be kind and we'll all have a good time.

Sign ups - Sign ups require manual approval to prevent spam.

Data protection - Your data is yours and you can download it at any time through the apps. The servers are run in a cluster with data redundancy across nodes + nightly and weekly backups to offline storage.

Should shutdown happen - There will be a 3 month announcement in advance, in accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant.

Funding - Keyboard Mastodon is currently funded by the admin, for a cost of ~$40 - $45 per month. Donations may be opened in the future, but have not been set up at this time.

## The Dirty Technicals

If you're not a mega-nerd, turn back now.

I warned you.

Keyboard Vagabond is run on a 3 node Kubernetes cluster running on 3x Arm VPSs hosted by NetCup in Amsterdam. I chose Amsterdam because I thought that Europe would be more centrally located for people who are traveling the world.

#### The Specs

Servers
  3x 10 ARM vCPUs, 16GB Ram, 500GB (~50GB for Talos and the rest for Longhorn) storage running Talos and Kubernetespan.
Storage
  Longhorn ensures that there are at least 2 copies across the nodes.
Backups and Content
  Stored in S3 storage hosted by BackBlaze with CloudFlare providing CDN. I've already run through disaster recovery and restored database backups from S3.
CDN
  CloudFlare provides CDN and special rules have been set up to be sure that as much as possible is cached.
Security
  Ports are closed off to the world and secured with CloudFlare tunnels and secure VPN as the only means of access outside of website access.
Observability and Logging
  OpenObserve dashboards and log aggregation.
Domain
  Domain is provided by CloudFlare
Services
  Typical arrangement for services is that web services get 2 instances and workers get 1 instance with autoscaling. Web pods scale horizontally and workers scale vertically, then horizontally.
Source Code
  If I get the source code to where I'm comfortable sharing, I'll post a link here. And if you're experienced in k8s, I'd always appreciate a review. :)

Costs
VPS servers - 3x ~$13 / mth = $40/mth
Domain name - $12/year
Backblaze - $6/TB/mth = ~$2/mth
Total: ~$45/mth