Running GoToSocial Alongside a PDS

@cmdr-nova.mkultra.social · Post by **cmdr_nova** » Sun Oct 05, 2025 1:42 pm

Earlier in the week, or, last week at this point, Jay Busky (Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky) went on an unhinged meltdown over people (trans people, mostly) asking her if the Bluesky moderation team has banned Jesse Singal yet. This obviously prompted some to drop Bluesky altogether and head toward Mastodon/the Fediverse, despite biases some may hold. Which, for all intents and purposes, are mostly things large swaths of Bluesky users have gaslit themselves into believing, i.e., "it's too hard" or "Linux is bad, so Mastodon is bad" (what kind of opinion is that, anyway?), and so on and so forth. Me, though, I'm a little more conflicted, since I'm running a PDS and not entirely subject to the CEO having a meltdown over people asking her to stop doing evil things.

Regardless, even if you run a PDS, you could still potentially be cut-off from the entire network if the Bluesky moderators decide to block your PDS. And that's almost entirely because, there are next to no other relays running, aside from maybe two or three. That's bad. That's a problem.

But, as you know, running a PDS is extremely light-weight. So light-weight, in fact, that you can run a GoToSocial instance alongside it, on the same server.

Which I now do.

You can see my GoToSocial landing page, here.

Since maintaining and possibly moving to only posting on the fediverse again is likely something I'm going to be doing, I wanted a way to move my automated accounts to the fediverse, that wouldn't require feeding them into an account on mastodon.social, or searching for some random instance run by a stranger, who may decide they don't want my bots around at some point in the future. GoToSocial is great for this.

It's light-weight, and could run for quite a long time before ever causing any serious concern on storage or bandwidth.

This is largely because GTS doesn't index posts outside of your own instance, and it also doesn't have a comprehensive search function.

GoToSocial is not designed for 'must-follow' influencers with tens of thousands of followers, and it's not designed to be addictive.

Your timeline and your experience are shaped by who you follow and how you interact with people, not by metrics of engagement!

From the main GoToSocial website.

This, unfortunately, means that my account with hundreds of follows and followers probably isn't a great idea to move to GTS, because one of my reasons for being on social media is to share my music, my work, and my writing, and if I'm posting completely on a piece of software that makes discoverability, or discovering other people I'd like to connect with, a little bit harder, well, that's not optimal.

It is, however, just fine for my python art-bot.

You can follow that account by searching up @pygen@gts.mkultra.social, which posts simultaneously to both Bluesky and the fediverse.

And this account, this GoToSocial instance, is running in Caddy, right next to my PDS. Both are functional, both experience zero lag or networking issues.

If I could find a way to build a bridge between the two, I could potentially go wild and make a PDS-GTS prototype that blows the internet out of the water.

Alas, I am not a genius engineer and I don't know the first thing about building an ATProtocol/Fediverse bridge that works both ways. But, that may not even matter, because Jay Busky seems intent on making Bluesky unattractive to normal people who don't want to coexist with losers who post hate and bigotry at all times.

Nevertheless, that's what I've been doing with my time, ever since I got injected with a flu shot, my ears flushed, and handed antibiotics in order to cleanse my body of whatever-the-hell's been wrong with me the past two weeks.

Up next? More bots? Maybe something that integrates Second Life to the fediverse? I dunno!

Source: https://mkultra.monster/social-media/20 ... s-and-gts/