When I poked around with Postmarks (a federated bookmarking service) last year, I briefly mentioned another federated server, Shuttlecraft… but I never followed up on that.
Shuttlecraft is a single-user ActivityPub-compatible application that can run on a platform like Glitch – in fact, it’s more-or-less a single-click deployment to fork and install on Glitch.
I’ve written about being all-in on the Fediverse and I generally try a lot of different things out. I created a Shuttlecraft instance for myself around the same time I set up Postmarks last year – both run on Glitch, both are somewhat experimental / in-progress and unfinished. The fact is that I use my Postmarks instance all the time for logging links of interest, but Shuttlecraft has really just been sitting there without very much interaction. That’s mostly deliberate, it’s a playground more than anything else, and it can be handy for playing with interactions with other ActivityPub servers.
However – yesterday I thought I’d take a quick look at it, only to discover that my Glitch app was down.
After doing some digging in the console and logs, I found that Node was complaining about being unable to load a module. That was surprising to me, as I hadn’t changed anything there for a long while. It turned out that what was actually happening was that the container’s disk allocation had run out, and the log message itself was spurious.
To be fair, the Shuttlecraft README is very clear that a) it’s an unsupported side-project from the author Ben Brown, and b) …
all data is written as PLAIN TEXT FILES to the disk.
Right now, the app builds an IN-MEMORY INDEX of EVERY SINGLE POST. This will work for several thousand posts, but … maybe not for 10,000s of posts. I’m not sure how far it will go. I have ideas about being able to shard the index into multiple files and page through it, etc. But.
It took a bit of very messy and imperfect cleanup inside hidden directories in the Glitch container, but for now, I have my small instance back up again. Realistically, it is probably not worth following / I don’t look at it much / it will fall over again, before much longer – but it’s also a fun thing to tinker with, and the code is quick to tweak in the Glitch editor.
In the past few months, quite a few things have changed in the ecosystem – for example, I’m now on Threads, and my account is federated out from there. Shuttlecraft is missing something in its ability to play nicely with that, which is a bit sad… maybe I’ll have to have a look into it at some stage.
I’ll have to look at some more Fediverse-compatible apps soon, hopefully more resilient ones! 
Fediforum is coming up next month, and that’s usually a great place to learn about what developers are working on across the ActivityPub ecosystem.
https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/07/recovering-my-shuttlecraft/
First Birthady 
today! 
- Instanzen, denn