<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Sign ups</strong> -
Sign ups require manual approval to prevent spam.</p>
<p><strong>Data protection</strong> -
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.</p>
There will be a 3 month announcement in advance, in accordance with the <ahref="https://joinmastodon.org/covenant"target="_blank">Mastodon Server Covenant</a>.</p>
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.</p>
<h1>The Dirty Technicals</h1>
<p>If you're not a mega-nerd, turn back now.</p>
<p>I warned you.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Servers</strong> - 3x 10 ARM vCPUs, 16GB Ram, 500GB (~50GB for Talos and the rest for Longhorn) storage running <ahref="https://www.talos.dev"target="_blank">Talos</a> and Kubernetes.
<p><strong>Storage</strong> - Longhorn ensures that there are at least 2 copies across the nodes.</p>
<p><strong>Backups and Content</strong> - 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.</p>
<p><strong>CDN</strong> - CloudFlare provides CDN and special rules have been set up to be sure that as much as possible is cached.</p>
<p><strong>Security</strong> - ports are closed off to the world and secured with CloudFlare tunnels and TailScale as the only means of access outside of website access.</p>
<p><strong>Observability and Logging</strong> - OpenObserve dashboards and log aggregation.</p>
<p><strong>Domain</strong> - domain is provided by CloudFlare</p>
<p><strong>Services</strong> - 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.</p>
<p><strong>Source Code</strong> - 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. :)</p>
<p>Contact: <ahref="mailto:sysadmin@mailkeyboardvagabond.com">sysadmin@mail.keyboardvagabond.com</a>, any of the @sysadmin accounts on the instances</p>
