# Keyboard Vagabond - About

# About Keyboard Vagabond

Keyboard Vagabond is a place where nomads, travelers, backpacker, 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 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 Kubernetes.

Storage - Longhorn ensures that there are at least 2 copies across the nodes.

Backups and Content - Backups and content are 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 TailScale 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