Disclosure: This post was generated using Anthropic Claude+ via Poe using my notes as a prompt. Read Using LLMs to actually finish some blog posts for more details.

Here we go again! As an experienced writer and coder, I was filled with excitement at the prospect of setting up my own little Kubernetes cluster to explore. Though I’ve been building with code and prose for decades, tinkering with new tools never gets old. While setting up this cluster, however, I couldn’t help but muse on the implications of developing and promoting tools that could someday change the means of production as we know it, ushering in a new age of luxury gay space communism where creativity reigns supreme. A guy can dream!

Pleroma is an open source social network platform that is a part of the Fediverse. In this write-up, I will be describing my experience with installing the OTP release on a Linux VM in Google Cloud by following the official documentation.

For someone who works with Kubernetes clusters daily and deploys to them using Helm, the idea of manually configuring a VM to run my application is an adorable flashback to a simpler time. It brings me back to my days as a student systems administrator at Oregon State or the very early days wherein I would run Unreal Tournament servers from my home Linux computer. Are you feeling the nostalgia?

Despite working for Facebook a few years ago, I’m not a huge fan of the platform. I think that attempting to cram every human being on the planet into one massive social network without any concept of community enforcement is counterproductive and antithetical to how humans are capable of socializing. We evolved to interact with small bands of hunter-gatherers, not thousands of individuals via highly abstract proxies for interaction such as Likes and Hearts. This has been written about in much more detail than I can do justice by many people much smarter than me so I won’t attempt my own “hot take” on it. If you are curious about the concept, look into Dunbar’s Number.